


the moon's got a grip on the sea

by whisperedwords



Category: National Football League RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Trade, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Long Distance Heartbreak, M/M, Pining, Temporarily Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-13
Updated: 2018-06-13
Packaged: 2019-05-21 17:37:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 30,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14919873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whisperedwords/pseuds/whisperedwords
Summary: The headline flashes across ESPN later that afternoon, big block letters that exclaim ODELL BECKHAM JR TRADE BLOCKBUSTER, featuring a variety of photoshop attempts of him in red and white and gold, him standing next to Jimmy Garoppolo, him as part of a trio of receivers he doesn’t—he doesn’t even—





	the moon's got a grip on the sea

**Author's Note:**

> hey, so, ever wonder what would happen if odell beckham jr actually got traded? apparently my dumb ass brain did, and so i spent an entire month writing a behemoth au that did nothing but break my heart.
> 
> IMPORTANT NOTES TO CONSIDER:  
> \- i name dropped a bunch of 49ers players and absolutely rearranged their schedule this upcoming season to satisfy my plot requirements.  
> \- i also casually name dropped a bunch of giants players, too, so if you have any questions about who's who, feel free to ask.  
> \- i know NOTHING about actual league rules and regulations so this is all my elaborate angst fantasy.  
> \- this is NOT part of my previously-established ying yang!verse.
> 
> thank you to my tumblr angels, who shall remain nameless but know who they are nonetheless, for encouraging me to write this fic even though like 5 people care about eli/odell as a romantic pairing. also, thank you to YOU for embarking on this angst-ridden au with me, because it's probably going to either disappoint you or break your heart. sorry in advance. (not really.)
> 
> ((all mistakes are my own 'cause editing is for people who are actually good at writing.))
> 
> eventually i'll link to the alternate sad ending to this, but for now, this happy one will have to do. for more eli/odell content, don't forget to check out [the library](http://eoverse.tumblr.com).
> 
> (title from, you guessed it, a [john mayer song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08Ndzf5-HxI).)

The call comes in around 2:30pm as Odell is flipping through cable channels. The number flashes up across his phone screen as  _GETTLEMAN_ —in all caps, of course, because from the moment he’d been hired he had been getting firm, non-Reese-like vibes, which had been a welcome change. He mutes his TV and swipes across the screen to answer the call.

“Hey, Mr. Gettleman,” he says coolly, shifting so that he’s sitting up straight as if Dave can see him from across the country. “Whassup?”

“Hey, Odell,” Dave answers, his Boston accent thick enough to completely change the sound of his own name. “Listen, I wanted to reach out before the Post prints something first.”

That draws his attention. “Sorry, what?”

“We...Odell, you’ve been nothin’ but the best for us, you really have, but...” Gettleman pauses, like he’s measuring his words. Something cold strikes him in the gut—foreboding, almost. “Listen. Shanahan and the 9ers made us an offer we just...we couldn’t refuse. We’re moving your contract out to San Francisco.”

The cold sense of foreboding floods his stomach. His brain feels fuzzy. “I’m...being traded?”

“Odell, ‘m so sorry I had to let y’know this way. You’ll always be a Giant for life. Again, we’re grateful for everythin’ you’ve done for us.”

“I.” Odell thinks he’s going to faint. His brain switches to autopilot. “Thank you, sir.”

“If there’s anythin’ you need, Odell, you can always call us.” He goes on to say some other things too, but his voice sounds a thousand miles away as it reiterates  _giant for life_  in the way he’d wanted to hear it the least. Everything about the city, about New York, about MetLife and East Rutherford and his boys in blue...

Eli.

As soon as Dave hangs up, Odell sprints to his bathroom and heaves into the toilet. Nothing comes up but he still retches, still feels sick because this is it. This is really it, isn’t it. The end of it all. Of everything.

The headline flashes across ESPN later that afternoon, big block letters that exclaim  _ODELL BECKHAM JR TRADE BLOCKBUSTER_ , featuring a variety of photoshop attempts of him in red and white and gold, him standing next to Jimmy Garoppolo, him as part of a trio of receivers he doesn’t—he doesn’t even—

He feels numb as his phone keeps buzzing on the tiled floor, the sound eerily loud in his suddenly-too-quiet house. Somewhere along the line, he realizes he has to do it. Has to call his quarterback, tell him. Apologize. He knows Eli will take the initiative first, will ring him up like he’d done four years ago to congratulate him except this time it will worse, it will be so much worse. After everything, after  _all_ of this, it will be infinitely worse.

So he picks himself up off the bathroom floor, splashes his face with cold water a few times, and then presses the  _E_  contact sitting in his “most frequently contacted” list.

“Hey.” Eli’s voice is cool and collected as the dial tone and ringing stop. Odell feels like he’s going to be sick again.

“Hi,” he replies, trying to keep his voice low so it doesn’t crack. He takes a deep breath. “I’m guessing you heard.”

“I....” A rustle on the other end of the line fills Odell’s ear, and he can  _tell_  that Eli’s rifling through the new playbook Coach Shurmur had printed for him. He can’t breathe because he’s just  _imagining_  Eli sitting hunched over, flipping through the routes and calls before they’ve even stepped out onto the field. He can’t stop imagining it. “Damn, O.” In only a moment’s notice he realizes the depth of what’s just happened. Eli would’ve made a joke here, about the media or ESPN being annoying or even just about the West Coast in general, but he remains silent. He’s silent and Odell is drowning in it.

“I know.” He’s not sure what else to say, not even sure why he called his quarterback—his  _former_  quarterback, oh my  _god_ —because he can’t even say the words. Can’t even say goodbye. “I just—”  _Wanted to hear your voice?_  “I wanted to say, you know. Thank you.” He pauses to clear his throat. “For everything.” Eli is still dead quiet on the other end of the phone and Odell just keeps going, can’t stop his mouth. “You stood by me when not many people really would and you knew I was special from the moment we, uh,” another pause to choke down the lump in his throat, “from the moment you went out on that Isadore field with me. And I just...wanted to say, you know. It was everything to me.” He forces a laugh from his throat, but it just comes out as more of a wheeze than anything. “’f you hadn’t reached out all those years ago, man...I can’t even imagine.”

“Me neither.” Eli sounds distant. Odell can feel his heart shattering piece-by-piece in his chest. He hates this—hates that it’s happening to him, that he’s being separated from the only quarterback he’s ever really known, from ten years of passes and chemistry and friendship, and  _Christ_ , how could this—how could this be happening to him? His TV, still muted, is replaying his highlight reel, and when a brief clip of their super bowl commercial airs the knot in his stomach reemerges. For a split second, he thinks he can hear something similar playing behind Eli’s voice—or lack thereof.

“I’m sorry.” Is there anything else? Anything but _sorry_ feels wrong, feels inappropriate. “I’m really, really sorry, E.”

“Don’t be sorry, Odell,” Eli replies. Cool, again. Collected, absent of emotion but in a safe way. In an Eli way. He feels sick with it. “’s not your choice, and I...” He quiets for a moment. “I know you’re gonna be great in San Francisco. They ain’t gonna know what hit ‘em.” Odell laughs humorlessly at that. He doesn’t want to  _be_ in San Fran. Not like this. Eli’s voice softens in his ear. “You really have made these last few years amazing, O, in a way nobody else has. You should know that, before you go. Thank you.”

 _There’s never been anyone else_ , Odell wants to say.  _There will never be anyone else, it will always be you, you are the beginning and the end of everything I’ve ever known and I don’t want to go, I don’t want to leave you like this_. But he can’t. He can’t, he can’t, he  _knows_  he can’t and it’s strangling him because the words feel so heavy on his tongue. “Thank you, E,” he says instead, barely able to reach whisper-tone. “Thank you.”

He throws his phone against the wall when Eli hangs up. It shatters to pieces, and Odell sinks to the floor right beside it. He’s too tired to cry. Instead, he answers the fifty-something texts from his new teammates and pretends like he can do this. Jimmy Garoppolo sends him a thumbs-up emoji and a “can’t wait to see you dude” and Odell, for a moment, hates him for it. Something ugly rears in his chest at knowing that  _this_  is his quarterback now.  _This_  is the way things will be. For the next four years, nothing will change. At that, the hatred fades into something quieter, something worse: apathy.

 **o:** haha. letsgetitttttttt

* * *

 

The room feels cold as he sits in the Big Chair, pen in hand and hovering over the piercing white contract binding him to San Francisco for four years.  _The extension I deserve_ , he thinks, but it tastes bitter in his mouth and he hates it. The photographers the team had hired start to adjust their cameras noisily, which draws Odell back from the abyss of his thoughts. With a halfhearted grin, he adjusts the new too-red cap on his head and signs the paper. The cameras flash in front of him, and he keeps grinning falsely, like he’d been practicing in the mirror all week. He puts his new too-red jersey on over his dress shirt and smiles for the cameras again as he shakes Kyle Shanahan’s hand.  _The Newest San Francisco Giant_  is plastered all over ESPN and the local news outlets within two hours of the signing, and the official 49ers twitter account has posted pictures with thousands of retweets, but it all feels fake. It feels wrong.

His phone alerts him to a new Giants headline— _Manning Confident Giants Will Remain Strong After Odell Beckham’s Departure_ —and he swallows down the bile in his throat. Had he broken Eli? Had he abandoned Shep and Roger and the people he’d grown to call family? What would Damon do if he couldn’t find a babysitter on the fly? Who would he call?

“Can’t wait to see you on the field,” Kyle says, bringing him back to Earth. Odell nods, keeps the smile up for a moment or two longer.

“Me too, coach.” That couldn’t be further from the truth.

* * *

 

A few nights later, Saquon Barkley goes to the New York Giants at pick number two, and jealousy spikes in Odell Beckham Jr’s veins. He sends out an immediate text, of course— _congrats lil bro, ur gonna kill it in ny_ —but stews on the pick for a while, especially when the 49ers pick flashes across the screen as  _TRADE: GIANTS_ , where they pick up McGlinchey, too. (Bitterly, he thinks about laughing with his teammates— _former_  teammates—about Dave’s term “hog mollies” and how silly it sounded. Here was Hog Molly Number One. _A parting gift_ , Odell thinks as he chugs down a glass of water.) He’d been hyping the Giants up for Saquon for  _months_ , talking about how great the higher-ups are and how unexpectedly hilarious the kitchen staff is and how great Eli Manning is to work with—and yet tonight, on draft night, here he is, three thousand miles away from the only organization he’s ever known, and Saquon is there. He’s  _there_ , and Odell is still here, still trapped on the West Coast but this time without any reason to travel back to the city. His city.

Saquon texts him back a few minutes afterward, something about “God’s plan” and how he wishes they could play together, how he’s excited to see him later on in the season. It’s only then that Odell realizes that he’s going to have to go up against his Giants and try to win. The ache in his chest intensifies as he imagines himself decked out in red, running up against his boys. He thinks about Snacks again; he’d called Damon the best run-blocker in the lead by “a thousand miles” three weeks before, though it felt like a lifetime, now, and the sentiment still stands as he imagines whatever starting ‘back for his new team colliding painfully with his friend.

He hates Dave Gettleman for sending him to the West Coast, but he hates _himself_ even more, for even entertaining these thoughts. Football is football—he should be lucky he even gets to play, especially on a team that’s as young and up-and-coming as San Fran. But the thought doesn’t drive the frustration and anger from his mind, so he turns the draft off and crawls into bed, not caring that it’s only 5pm. He’s got half a mind to text Eli something about their new lineman, maybe a jab at their newly-refurbished line or something light and teasing, but realizes he wouldn’t be able to handle seeing Eli light his phone up, even with just a single word. He couldn’t handle it from _any_ of his former teammates. Setting his phone face-down on the side table, Odell closes his eyes and breathes deeply so that he doesn’t scream.

* * *

 

The magnitude of it all hits him on his first drive to the facility for practice. Thumbs tapping on his steering wheel, half-staring at his GPS and half-watching the road in front of him, Odell Beckham realizes with a flood of agony that he’s not going back. This is probably permanent. Traffic slows to a halt, and it’s probably for the better because he can’t control the way his forehead drops to the wheel in defeat. Jimmy Garoppolo’s voice echoes in his head from their first phone call earlier in the week, _Can’t wait, man, we’re gonna show the league how it’s done for years to come_ , and though it had come from a place of genuine friendship and camaraderie, to Odell it had sounded like a death sentence of the worst kind. _Four years_. The deal was enormous, topped off by an unfathomable amount of guaranteed money that his agent hadn’t been able to stop talking about for _days_ afterwards, but something about it felt like lead weights being tied to his ankles. Jimmy’s phone call had just solidified that, and he can’t even explain why.

In fact, he can’t even fathom why there’s this little seed of disdain planted in his chest when he thinks about the quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers until traffic finally starts moving again. It’s not because of his attitude, or his confidence, or his good looks or anything. It’s because he’s not Eli Manning.

Behind him, a cark honks angrily and Odell fights the urge to slam on his horn in return. Instead, he drags a hand over his face and signals into the right lane, mindlessly searching for the right exit number as his brain comes to terms with what he’d just discovered. _Eli_ is the reason he’s not acclimating to San Francisco. He’s not there to make old man jokes, or to mercilessly prank his teammates while giving Odell a wink, or even to just lock eyes with him in the huddle to transmit exactly how this play is meant to go without saying a word. Even just _knowing_ he won’t be the one calling out plays this season makes Odell nauseous. He rolls down the window to take a deep breath, the sound of the 405 flooding his car and inadvertently drowning out his music, but neither of those things even matter, because a half-second later it hits him.

He’s in love with Eli Manning.

Jesus Christ, he’s in love with two-time Super Bowl MVP, Ironman Streak Holding, goofiest-looking-quarterback-in-the-entire-NFL Eli Manning. He peels off the highway as soon as he sees his exit number, parks in the nearest gas station lot, and buries his face in his hands. Of all the times to figure this out…

 _It’s not like I could have actually said anything_ , he thinks. _He’d never feel the same way, and I don’t want to lose him_. Pause. With a bitter chuckle, he realizes that that last part has already happened. _Fuck_. Pressing the heel of his palms into his eyes, Odell forces back whatever tears or emotion that could surface and takes a deep, slow breath. The rumble of his car’s motor seems to vibrate through him, clearing his mind for a solid minute and allowing him to recollect himself.

“’m gonna be late to practice,” he says aloud after a few moments. Checking his phone, he notices a missed call from his new quarterback and the wide receivers coach and shakes his head. _Better late than never_. The drive to Levi feels long, but Odell thinks he’ll get used to it. He shoots both men separate texts, tells them he ran into traffic and that he’ll be there soon. (He imagines that Eli had been on the same drive to MetLife maybe two hours before, humming along to something country the way he had that one morning they’d gone to train together, before everyone else had arrived. The memory puts a smile on his face, and though it hurts to acknowledge, the swell of pride and affection for his former quarterback seems to crush the building trepidation in his chest.)

* * *

Of all the things that Odell Beckham is expecting to encounter when being on a new team, genuinely having fun had not been one of them. It’s barely been a month since Dave called and broke the news to him, and while the Giants are still a gaping hole in his heart, the wound is slowly beginning to heal up. He hasn’t had to spend too much time in the training facility, and he continues to work with his trainer back in LA because his ankle isn’t _quite_ right. The days he’s on site are ones that he usually spends with either his new receiving corps and the receivers coach, or with Jimmy, because Odell knows that the relationship between a quarterback and his receivers is one of the most important ones on the field. (He tells Jimmy this, and his new QB lights up, a huge smile spread across his face as he holds up a fist for Odell to bump. _Great minds think alike,_ he replies, and Odell pretends to laugh along as they head out to the parking lot.) Odell chats with Pierre Garçon a lot, too. Today, they talk and work out together for a little while, casually reminiscing about the NFC East and how annoying the Dallas Cowboys are and will probably continue to be.

“Shit, man. I’m just real glad to be out of that division.” Pierre takes a swig from the water bottle he’s got in his locker as they wind down for the day, sweaty and shirtless and recovering from a particularly grueling lifting session.

“Man, I’m just glad I don’t have Norman breathin’ down my back twice a year anymore.” O uses the ugly scarlet towel sitting on his stool to wipe the sweat from his face. “Shit’s annoying. Dude thinks he can keep using the same insults to get in my head all the time. Stupid.” He sips at his Gatorade. (Absentmindedly, he thinks of Eli, who’d been recommending this flavor to him between his many Super Bowl pressers. “ _You gotta help me promote it_ ” he’d said, and Odell had agreed with a smile as Eli knocked an arm into his side.)

“That dude made a _fortune_ off your name, Beckham.” The two receivers plop down next to each other on their respective chairs. “’sides, he knew the Giants wouldn’t do anything about it.” Odell cocks his head at Garçon’s statement, and Pierre looks up into the confused expression with a grin. “I mean, now that you’ve got a halfways decent quarterback, there’ll be less to be frustrated over, y’know?”

The jab at Eli makes Odell wince a little. “Hey, Eli’s better than you think, man.” He pauses, averts his gaze because he knows the look on his fellow receiver’s face is one of muted disbelief. “I mean, I guess you’re right. Still.” O swipes at his brow.

“Didn’t mean to rub you the wrong way, O. I keep forgettin’ you’ve only been here a month.” Pierre grins at him, as if to alleviate any tension he thought he’d just tossed in the air. “I respect the shit outta him, though. Pretty sure everyone does, ‘cept a couple dumbasses here and there. Not many people get to say they’ve played with a future Hall of Famer, so, yeah. Guess I’ll leave the shit-talking for when we’re in midseason form, yeah?” He knocks his elbow into Odell’s, and Odell can’t help himself from smiling a little, even despite what he’d just heard.

“Yeah, yeah, sure,” he replies, and almost on cue his phone lights up with a text from Shep across the country. He grins. “Hah. Speaking of Eli, apparently he just pranked the fuck outta the receiving room today.” He’d pulled a classic old guy prank: bucket of ice-cold water balanced on top of the door, and Sterling had been the first one in the room for that day’s mini-session…

“Ha,” Garçon replies, but it’s a kind of distant response. It’s funny: for a moment, Odell had forgotten what locker room he’d been in, and consequently had forgotten that not many other people think Eli’s pranks are that funny—or care who they’ve been done to. The smile on his face fades a little, but he replays the snap of Shep’s soaking-wet face staring dead into the camera with the most priceless expression, and he screenshots it because _god_ that’s gonna be leverage or a meme in the next ten days, he can _feel_ it. The smile picks back up.

“Whatcha lookin’ at?” A voice from the other side of the locker room calls, and Odell feels Pierre shift and then stand up beside him. Screenshot taken, he’s now able to look up and see who’s talking to him.

Of course, it’s his new quarterback, grinning ear-to-ear like he always seems to be and still so god damn good looking, even after lifting. Jimmy saunters over and fist-bumps the two receivers before collapsing into the stool to Odell’s right. (It doesn’t belong to him, but O’s not really gonna say anything. Besides, the cleaning crew will probably roll through here once everyone leaves, anyway.) Odell shakes his head and Pierre walks away, leaving the two of them alone. “’s nothin’. Just a funny text from a friend back east.”

“Back east like…Giants back east?” Jimmy raises an eyebrow but doesn’t seem to have any particular feelings beyond curiosity. Odell laughs once, locks his phone.

“Yeah, man. Still wanna hear from my boys and all that.” He doesn’t think it’d be a good idea to mix locker rooms any further, so he doesn’t explain the prank to Jimmy. Instead, he just shakes his phone goofily. At that, the quarterback chuckles—in a way, he’s almost like Eli, Odell thinks, and his heart softens. Not in many ways, but at least in this moment, that’s what Eli would do. He appreciates it silently, thankful that Jimmy is inadvertently easing him into this transition through the little things.

“’s nice to hear, Odell.” Not _Oh-_ dell. Odell. It doesn’t sound right, but he pushes the thought and the subsequent reactions to it down and nods, keeping a little smile on his face. “Listen, man, you got any secrets you wanna spill about that locker room, you let me know. ‘m all ears.” He grins, and _wow_. It really is like being around a hundred-watt lightbulb.

Odell stands up and hoists his Supreme backpack over his shoulder, mirroring Jimmy’s grin but not quite feeling it. “Man, you ain’t gonna get me to snitch on the home team,” he replies instinctively, forgetting that the home team is _not_ the New York Giants anymore in any way. He realizes this mistake as soon as the words leave his mouth, and he watches as Jimmy registers it, too. But Garoppolo doesn’t say anything: instead, he gets up too, his bright smile fading into something more sympathetic and nods a few times.

“Fair enough,” he replies good-naturedly. He turns and starts heads towards the showers, but then stops right before his locker. Towel in hand, he turns around and raises an eyebrow at Odell. “Hey, y’know, if you’re not doing anything this weekend, let me know. We should grab drinks or something. Get started on that relationship you said was so important.”

“I’ll let you know,” O replies, and Jimmy grins that bright smile again. Odell thinks he’s going to need sunglasses for the locker room this season.

* * *

 

Odell is going through the motions of a post-workout recovery routine when his phone rings. He puts down the bottle of Gatorade he’d been sipping on and reaches, albeit lazily, for the little vibrating brick sitting at the furthest corner of the coffee table. He swipes _accept_ on the call before even looking at the caller ID.

Phone leaning up against his face on the couch pillows, Odell swallows the sports drink in his mouth and then turns towards the speaker. “Whassup.”

“Hey, O.” Odell almost rolls off the couch in surprise as Eli’s voice fills his ears. He scrambles to bring the phone back up to his ear as he sits upright. “Hope I’m not interruptin’ anything?”

“Nah, you’re—not at all, what’s up?” All the breath leaves his lungs for a moment. Then: “How’ve you been, E?”

“Pretty good, _Oh_ -dell, pretty good. No complaints.” He chuckles. “Actually—y’know, never mind. I was just callin’ to see if you’ve got plans this weekend?” Something curls in Odell’s stomach, something buried deep that’s ready to surface. He _hmmm_ s for Eli to continue. “I was thinking—and, y’know, you can always say no, ‘cause I know you’ve got important team related stuff out there—”

“E.” Odell can’t keep the fondness out of his voice no matter how hard he tries. On the other end, Eli laughs quietly, and Odell swears he can hear little voices in the background, a mixture of laughter and shrieking, which knots O’s stomach even tighter.

“Sorry,” Eli mumbles sheepishly. Odell hears the way Eli’s hand presses to the microphone as he tells his girls “ _Hey, Daddy’s on the phone, can we use our inside voices?_ ”

“Is that Uncle O?” Ava’s voice is clear as day, and _christ_ , it makes him smile even despite all this. How sweet she is, how innocent Eli’s kids are—just like their father. Odell can only assume that Eli had nodded, because the other two small voices chant _Unca O! Unca O!_ and then giggle, gradually fading into silence.

“The kids say hi,” Eli manages when the phone returns to his ear. (Odell can hear the way his lips brush against the receiver for a split second, and it shouldn’t make his heart ache but it _does_. How his former quarterback manages to do that from across an entire country, Odell isn’t sure.) “Anyway. What I was _gonna_ ask was. If you’re not doing anything this weekend, ‘n it’s not too much trouble for me to ask, I was wonderin’ if we could, uh, get together? On the field.” He pauses and then clears his throat. “Y’know, to hammer out some drills and stuff. Gotta practice for the season and, I mean, you’re the best receiver I’ve got, so—”

“Eli, I’m not—” Odell isn’t sure if he’s actually _able_ to say _I’m not your teammate anymore_ , so he settles for clearing _his_ throat, too. “’m not part of your main corps anymore, remember?”

“Yeah.” The response seems a little distant. “Yeah, I know, I probably shouldn’t’ve—”

Odell makes a noise in his throat to interrupt Eli. “Nah, E, I’m not doin’ anything this weekend.” He’ll be damned if his stupid honesty about their situation ruins a perfectly good excuse to see the man he’s in love with—oh my _god_ —for the first time in over a month. “You want me to fly to you, or are you lookin’ to get out west?”

“Oh- _dell_ , you don’t…” he trails off, and Odell can swear he hears a soft little disbelieving laugh on the other end. They know each other too well to try and guilt each other out of this. “I mean, I guess—y’know, California sounds nice right about now. Rather be there in late Spring than in New York.” The two of them laugh, knowing full well what spring’s chilly presence in the tri-state area feels like. A shiver crawls up Odell’s spine, but he knows it’s not from thinking about a New England spring.

“Great,” he replies a little breathlessly. He shouldn’t feel excited but he is, he’s almost _giddy_ with it. “Friday? Or are you—is camp—?” He feels out of the loop for a half-second, and the slowly-healing hole in his heart begins to give way again. He should be there with them, he should _know_ —

“Nah, Friday’s good. See ya then, O.”

“See ya,” Odell answers. The last time he’d been on the phone with Eli, everything had completely fallen apart. Today, on a cool Wednesday afternoon in Los Angeles, there’s a small glimmer of hope that has sparked in his chest. Maybe something good will come out of this after all.

* * *

 

Of course, as soon as he establishes his plans with Eli, his _actual_ quarterback reaches out to him, unprompted. It’s casual, really—Odell rolls up to the facility the next morning, tea cooling in the cup holder of his car, and notices Jimmy walking up to the front doors. In an attempt to be a better teammate to the team he doesn’t actually want to be on, he rolls down his window and hollers a _whassup, man?_ as he pulls into the parking space nearest to him. Jimmy turns at his shout and grins, and _damn_ , the sunglasses do help—he’s not as taken aback when his new quarterback saunters over and gives him a fist-bump as Odell climbs out of his car.

“How ya doin’?” Jimmy asks, and Odell gives him the generic answer: pretty good, ready to work and all that. “Good to hear, man. And hey—any word on this weekend?”

 _Shit_. “This weekend’s a little tight,” he replies apologetically. He thinks about spending the weekend throwing with Eli after almost an entire year of absence between them, injury and the current offseason adding up to quite a long amount of time since their last pass completion, and the excitement that prickles at his fingertips makes him feel even guiltier that he’s still not letting go of his old East Rutherford life. Jimmy shrugs understandingly and opens his mouth to say something, but Odell lightly knocks the back of his hand against his quarterback’s bicep to stop him. “We could do somethin’ tonight, though?”

At that, Jimmy’s face lights up. “We absolutely can, dude, but are you sure? I mean, if you’re busy, don’t worry—”

“You were right about relationship building,” O interrupts. He grabs the strap of his Supreme bag sitting over his shoulder like he’s a high schooler again and knocks his other shoulder against Jimmy’s while they walk towards the facility’s entrance. “If I’m gonna be the player you guys need this season, I owe it to y’all to put my best foot forward. Relationships especially.”

“For sure,” Jimmy echoes. The smile on his face has lowered only slightly in wattage, and he holds up his fist for Odell to bump. O obliges with a smile that doesn’t take too much effort to put on, and the two of them meet with the rest of the offense inside as they get dressed for run-throughs.

He doesn’t get to participate in a lot of the team drills outside of stretching under the warm San Francisco sun due to his rehabbing schedule, but it doesn’t stop him from spending time with his teammates and watching from the sidelines as his new squad churns out play after play of what looks like a fluid, high-intensity offense. Part of him is excited to step into his role within it, though he’d never admit it to himself—his first four years in the league had been coordinated by Ben McAdoo, an infamous name he can’t help but feel spite towards for what he’d done to his team ( _former_ team, he reminds himself) who’d insisted that every offensive play was, in some way, meant to sit on Odell’s own shoulders. It worked fine in the first few years, sure, but by last season, his friends around the league would tell him week to week that New York’s offensive schemes were _predictable_ and obvious for the opposing defenses to pick apart. So this? The _refreshed_ offense that Kyle Shanahan is running, the tight defense that Coach Saleh is putting together? It has Odell practically trembling to pieces with excitement.

From the sidelines, he nods and shouts for Pierre and Marquise as they successfully fool the practice squad corners with two trick-routes in a row. Pierre jogs over and fist-bumps him, and Marquise gives him a thumbs-up before he walks over to Jimmy. (Jimmy, who Odell can’t help but notice had been eyeing him on the sidelines when he wasn’t scanning the defense for potential breakthroughs. He brushes it off casually.)

Practice ends at around 3, and everyone peels out of the parking lot in a rush to enjoy the rest of the pleasantly-warm May afternoon. On his drive back to his LA house—he’s still looking for a place in San Francisco, but it’s more of a half-assed search than anything, since he’s been living in his current home for a while and really likes it—Odell is tapping his thumbs along to his post-workout playlist when his phone _ding_ s. He presses a button on his steering wheel, and the car’s OS reads out the text he’d just received.

“From, Jimmy G. Hey if you’re still on tonight let me know.” Odell grins at the robotic tone that his car has—he keeps joking about investing in a program that’ll make his Ferrari sound like himself, or Aubrey ( _that_ one had made his friend laugh—“ _nah, it’d just sound like a mixtape and someone’d try and steal it from you, man_ ”) or anyone who had a recognizable tone that O’d be able to pay attention to regularly. Absentmindedly, he’d once thought about putting Eli’s voice in there, but the thought had passed as quickly as it had appeared in his head. He taps the little microphone icon on his keyboard and responds.

“Hell yeah, comma, let’s do it, exclamation point. Where should we meet, question mark?” Traffic slows to a stop, and he watches Siri put together his sentence with the right punctuation. After editing in some extra letters to maintain his own personal texting style, he hits send. The quarterback responds almost immediately, and his car reads the text, as the car in front of him starts to move again.

“From, Jimmy G. 9:45 my place I’ll text you the address ok.” The next message he gets is, in fact, the address, but Odell’s car picks it up and puts it into the GPS automatically. He eyes the LED text that flashes along the screen of his dashboard and then presses the _save_ icon at the top right corner of it. While he doesn’t actually label it in the system, he thinks he’ll remember that it’s Jimmy’s place in the handful of hours between now and when he leaves for the evening.

* * *

When he pulls up to Jimmy’s house, he realizes just _how_ rich his new quarterback is. Young and ambitious with the energy of an entire franchise inside him, he’s practically the complete opposite of what Eli had been in New York—the house itself is huge, windows upon windows and sleek wood paneling in between, with a stone stairwell up to his front door attached to the massive garage dug out from the hill the place is sitting on. It’s aesthetically pleasing and a little bit pretentious, but O thinks he can get past that part, especially because Jimmy had been in New England for his first few years in the league and he’s pretty sure that those two traits are melded into his personality of gold.

“Hey, Odell!” Looking up, Odell spots Jimmy descending the stairs into the driveway and waves once. The quarterback jogs up to him and they fist-bump, a gesture that looks to be the early version of a new handshake of sorts. “Glad you found me. My ubers always have a hard time. Jesus, one time the guy told me to stand out on the end of the street because he couldn’t see the number on my house.”

Odell laughs. “Really? Shit, dude. Aren’t you like, the biggest name in San Francisco right now? You’d think he try a little harder considering.”

“Pretty sure that’s you right now, Beckham.” The comment makes his voice get a little softer, but it’s just another thing Odell brushes off. They walk to his car and get in, and almost as soon as the engine starts up, Drake’s newest album blasts through the speakers. Odell thinks that his new quarterback is going to flinch, or roll his eyes at the lyrics—it’s what Eli would do, he thinks instinctively. The Giants quarterback always had an affinity for country, which Odell would argue is the _worst_ genre to ever have been invented, and while the video of him dancing to one of the 80s songs on their preseason locker room playlist last year proved that his taste wasn’t solely based in twang, it wasn’t very likely that he’d bump along to this.

But, to his surprise (though he’s not sure _why_ he’s surprised in the first place), Jimmy starts to bob his head with the rhythm, that damn high-wattage smile lighting up his face as he clicks into his seatbelt. “Fuck yeah, dude. I love Drake. Dude’s the best rapper out there right now, or at least one of ‘em.” He starts to sing along, and Odell can’t help but laugh as they pull out of the driveway. Jimmy turns and looks at him, raising an eyebrow but continuing to sing until Odell reaches the stop sign at the end of the road.

“You laughin’ at me, Beckham?” The smile on his face gives away the otherwise neutrality of his tone, and Odell shakes his head, still giggling quietly. “Thought we were building a relationship over here, but y’know, if you’re gonna be like that…”

Odell breaks into the first quick-paced verse almost on cue, and it’s Jimmy’s turn to laugh as they drive through the dimly lit backroads of San Francisco’s outskirts. The club they’re headed to is low-key, more of a bar than a club, Jimmy’d said, but the ladies were fine and being a 49er always paid the bills whenever any of the team showed up, as long as the night ended damage-free. Odell can’t _imagine_ partying in Manhattan on a regular basis like this—the paparazzi were so constantly on him that he’d even been called out for breaking up a fight at a party he hadn’t even _gone_ to. To be able to exhale like this, underneath the lights without a concert setting (or anything, really) to try to blend into, it feels new to Odell. He parks a block or so away to avoid any potential risk, and then his night begins.

They sit down at the bar, and the bartender looks excited and shocked for about five minutes before he actually takes their orders. It’s sweet, Odell thinks, the way their presence has this one man so star struck. In Manhattan, the amount of time between fan realization and action is about half, and Odell’s had to leave many nightclubs because people won’t leave him alone. This might be the first thing that he doesn’t actively miss about being in the tri-state area—everything has a more intense, quiet, personable nature.

Jimmy distracts him from the contemplation with a nudge to O’s shoulder. “So, how’s the Bay Area treating you?” He takes a sip of his beer and Odell is appalled to notice that even _beer foam_ respects the quarterback enough to not settle on his upper lip the way it does on everyone else. He wants to laugh.

“’s good,” he replies instead, taking a drink of his own glass. “Been thinkin’ about moving out here for a while, actually, so this—” he waves a hand around him, “all this has been pretty convenient.” Jimmy nods at his words. O’s not sure what else to say—he’s not really used to casual drinking like this out in public, as if the two of them are just normal guys catching up after a long time rather than being two of the most famous names in professional sports. He’s not sure if he likes it.

“This isn’t my scene, either,” Jimmy says as if he can read Odell’s mind. It makes him jump a little. “But I figured, y’know, we should probably figure each other out through words first before we see any action.” He winks, and O laughs into his drink, a little disconcerted at how _easily_ his new quarterback had transitioned from normal conversation to flirtatious one in a matter of milliseconds. It’s not particularly _un_ welcome, it’s just…

“Then let’s make it more _our_ scene,” he says without thinking. Jimmy raises an eyebrow. Odell flags down the bartender, who’s in front of them in two seconds flat (the perks of being a world-renowned athlete, he thinks). “Bartender, could we get some shots lined up? Me and Jimmy G here wanna play a game.”

 _Game?_ Jimmy mouths at him, confused, and it’s Odell’s turn to wink at him before the man behind the bar lines up eight shot glasses and pours the closest bottle he’s got into each of them.

“We’ll finish our beers,” Odell explains, leaning in a little so he doesn’t have to shout over the rising noise of the people around them. “And then, once they’re done, we can play a little truth or dare.”

“Truth or dare?” Jimmy laughs into his beer. “What are we, teenage girls at a sleepover?”

“Hey, you were the one who wanted to know if there were any Giants locker room secrets the other week…” Odell pointedly trails his sentence off and takes a long swig of his drink before looking away dramatically. He hears his new quarterback exhale slowly and knows he’s won with that card.

“Fine. So what’re the rules?”

Jimmy learns quick, and the night speeds forward, lost in laughter and expensive liquor. The bar is nice, the drinks are good and plentiful, and in between rounds of truth or dare he gets several women’s numbers; he’s definitely drunk, but Odell can’t stop thinking about chasing after them late into the night. His new quarterback seems to be having an equally good time, though he’s good at drinking in a way that surprises Odell. There’s an innocent vibe coming off him in waves; his big eyes and bright laugh and young-looking face add up to something that catches Odell off guard every time he hears Jimmy’s voice drop into something husky and low over the drinks he’s nursing. They drink for a few more hours and nothing too out of the ordinary takes place.

“Y’know,” Jimmy mumbles as they stumble towards Odell’s car. O’s attention is currently on his phone, as he’s Ubering his friend out to the bar so he can drive them home, but he hums in belated acknowledgement. “’ve been watchin’ you, Odell Beckham, runnin’ all those routes for Eli.” At the name drop of his former quarterback, Odell lets out a long breath, suddenly very aware of how bad he is at hiding things when he’s this drunk. Luckily, Jimmy’s equally plastered, so he can’t really tell. “Y’all were a good pair.” He pokes a finger into O’s chest.

“Yeah,” Odell responds, unlocking the car. Ben is walking towards them in the parking lot, rolling his eyes but still fascinated that his best friend is now drinking buddies with _Jimmy G_. “Got real lucky, I guess.”

“But, you gotta know, we’re—” Jimmy stumbles and trips into the Ferrari, and Odell bursts out laughing as he clumsily tosses the keys to Ben. (It’s still a better pass than most incoming QBs would be able to throw.) Jimmy snorts and pushes himself upright in the backseat as Odell climbs in. “We’re gonna be better. Yeah? Can feel it, man, we’re gonna change the whole West Coast.”

No one else is going to be as good of a partner to Odell. Even drunk he knows this. But he’s got enough sense to remember that this had been a _bonding_ moment, a foundation of friendship and solidarity rather than a splitting of two unbelievably important and connected positions. So he laughs, half-nods and claps Jimmy on the shoulder to reaffirm his words without really saying them back. Something awful curls in his chest, something that sounds like _there’s never going to be anyone else_ that he’d almost confessed the night he’d first been traded. He swallows it down and then later that night, once Ben gets him home after dropping off the king of San Francisco, spits it back up into his toilet.

* * *

Odell meets Eli at the airport while nursing his hangover. It’s a bad idea, he knows, one that will only snowball into a larger, more visible sense of just _how_ he feels for his former quarterback, but it’s also the only idea that’s been pressing against his ribcage for the past forty-eight hours and making it hard to breathe. So he texts Eli after waking up early to purge his stomach again—finds out what flight he’s on under the guise of “I’ll text you my address once you land” because despite their closeness, Odell has never brought Eli to his LA home or really gotten to interact with him outside of their city—and then peels out of his driveway faster than he’d like to admit so that he can make it there on time. (The 405 is hell always, and airports in general are bad news, let alone _LAX_.) He parks the Ferrari (partially a humblebrag to the city of Los Angeles, partially the only car he had immediate access to as soon as Eli had texted him his flight’s landing time) and wanders inside, hands stuffed in his pockets as he paces— _paces_ —around the airport waiting for the JFK plane to land.

Of course, as he honestly should have expected in the first place, Eli’s flight lands the moment Odell nods off sitting in the terminal. The dull buzz of LAX combined with the security teams keeping him free of any fan encounters lures him into a placid state, and his brain is practically begging him to rest from trying to process all the drinking he’d just done hours before. In succumbing to that request, he inadvertently ends up taking a nap about fifteen minutes before Eli Manning’s flight to Los Angeles actually hits the ground. In retrospect, it’s fitting, because his former quarterback is the master of pranks and keeping Odell on his toes—how should this be any exception?

Odell blinks awake after an undisclosed amount of time, rubs his eyes, and then looks to his left to see Eli settled in the seat next to him, watching him with crinkly eyes and a dumb, dumb smile on his face. O almost falls out of the seat.

“When’d you get in?!”

Eli exaggeratedly checks his watch, pauses for a longer amount of time then he’d needed to, and then waggles his eyebrows. “Half an hour ago.”

“Why didn’t you _wake_ me, man.” The shock has worn off into familiarity, and Odell finds that they’re practically leaning into each other in the pair of seats they’d claimed, shoulders bumping like this had been the plan all along. Eli shakes his head, looks at his unassuming brown suitcase.

“Y’looked tired, O.” His voice is teasing, but there’s lingering affection behind his words, and Odell finds himself more flustered than he thought he’d be. He pushes himself up out of the seat and Eli follows suit. “Hey. I’ll drive, yeah? In case you want to doze off.” Eli winks and Odell _hates_ the way he completely gives in, because he’s never been able to say no to his quarterback, even before they’d become professional teammates. He grumbles goodnaturedly and drops the keyring into Eli’s outstretched palm. The quarterback hums in appreciation.

“No reckless driving,” Odell teases, and Eli chuckles. O joins in for a moment, more of a breathless giggle than anything, but the laughter softens into comfortable silence as they make their way out of LAX through the secret, paparazzi-less corridor that most wealthy and/or famous people have access to. When they reach the Ferrari, windows glinting in the mid-day sunlight, Odell looks at Eli from the passenger seat, feeling a little bleary-eyed just seeing him here. “’s good to have you here, E.”

“Nowhere else I’d rather be,” Eli replies easily. His smile is genuine, and it would be so _easy_ to believe him, to think he’d dropped everything in New York City just for _him_ and not for practice reps or efficiency or pre-season preparations.

But he had. He had, and while Odell is overjoyed that Eli wants to throw with _him_ , it suddenly feels like he’s in high school again, where E exists on another inaccessible plane and the distance between them will always be further than just where the ball ends up at the end of the route. So he doesn’t reply to Eli’s comment, just nods once and then climbs in and plugs his address into the GPS. Drake blares through the speakers as they head back out onto the 405, and O thinks that there _has_ to be someone above looking out for his mental stability because they don’t hit a lick of traffic the entire way. The car ride is smooth and relatively uneventful, and when they pull up to Odell’s house, it’s still light out. The clock on the car’s dashboard reads 4:45.

“My guest room’s open,” Odell says quietly once the car’s rumbling comes to a stop. “It’ll be cheaper than staying at a hotel, and media-wise—”

“’s perfect, Odell. Thank you.” For a split second, the 9ers receiver sitting in the passenger seat wants nothing more than to bridge the gap between them and kiss the quarterback until they forget the 3,000 mile gap between them. The impulse is _strong_ —Eli’s cheeks are a little red from the heat, his hair mussed up from the wind, and he’s grinning like a little kid, the boyish southern charm flooding off him in waves, which only makes Odell want to follow through with it even more.

Of course, Eli interrupts Odell’s dangerously intimate thoughts with a chuckle. He looks up at the sound. “What?”

Eli’s chuckle turns into a full-blown laugh. “Wanna, uh, throw the ol’ pigskin around?” He’s using his gruff “old timey dad” voice he used to do all the time around the locker room when he’d see newer trends— _‘is that what the kids do?’_ said in jest to his young receiving corps, and they’d laugh as he pretended to hobble towards them before high-fiving them all. It’s just as effective here; Odell giggles in the passenger seat, and Eli continues to beam at him with his face still flushed.

“Sure, pops,” O manages between wheezes. They climb out of the car and Eli, bless his heart, rummages through his suitcase for _maybe_ 30 seconds before he pulls a football out. Odell raises an eyebrow. “Really?”

“Gotta come prepared,” Eli replies with a sheepish grin. “Didn’t I teach you _anything_ in New York?” As soon as he says it Odell can see on his face that he regrets it—the ache in O’s chest of wanting to close that thousand-mile-gap between them deepens, and though he doesn’t think he reacts physically, he knows that Eli knows. Instead of allowing the silence to linger, though, the quarterback knocks a gentle fist into O’s shoulder and smiles at him, softer than before but still full of that warm, productive energy he always has. “Let’s go, yeah? Gotta tell you about these plays that Coach Shurmur is having me run.”

* * *

They spend the rest of that afternoon throwing the ball around, and Odell calls it quits around 8, when the two of them order takeout and catch up quietly over the local Chinese food place down the road. But it’s not the evening intimacy that has Odell’s lungs practically knotted.

It’s the morning after. He’s the first awake around the house, as always, to feed the dogs and give them the appropriate number of kisses before letting them run around the backyard. When he steps back into the kitchen through the sliding glass door, he practically collides chest-to-chest with Eli. They barely avoid crashing into each other, and O finds himself giggling despite how tired (and _dehydrated_ ) he is. Eli just smiles dumbly.

“Mornin’, O,” he says. His voice is low and husky, layers of sleep still chipping away at it, and it sends a shiver up Odell’s spine in a way that he doesn’t really think he can control. He hopes Eli doesn’t notice. “You got coffee?”

“Don’t think so,” Odell replies, voice more of a rasp than anything. Eli’s eyes are crinkly as his sleepy, warm gaze falls fully on him, and O finds that his fingertips are prickling again at being so close to him. “But there’s, uh, tea if you want it.” Sunlight is filtering through the bay window in his kitchen, spilling over Eli as if to accentuate his presence in Odell’s home so early in the morning. It’s a little breathtaking, if he’s being honest. O manages to extract himself from Eli’s orbit after a few moments of this appreciation and moves towards the left side of his kitchen.

“Tea’s fine,” Eli answers a little late, lingering under the sunlight and pressing his fingers to the bridge of his nose. He’s still half asleep, Odell realizes, and something in him twists at the thought of this. Reaching into the nearest cabinet and pulling out two mugs, he lifts his head in summons to the tired quarterback, who approaches without question. “Thanks.”

Odell plants two _wake up_ tea bags in their mugs and then fills them with the boiling water from his electric kettle. His heart is sitting in his throat because this feels _intimate_ , feels special in a way that he’s never quite experienced before—he pushes the now-filled mug towards Eli, who gratefully picks it up from the counter and then immediately sets it back down again, a muffled grunt of pain filling the space between them. O can’t help but laugh.

“’s tea, E, it’s gonna be hot.”

“Thanks for the warning,” Eli deadpans, and Odell laughs. “Sorry, just…’m used to having coffee in one of those—” he mimes a drinking gesture for a few moments before throwing the hand up in the air. “You know. ‘s my one bad habit.”

“Caffeine’s your drug of choice, huh?” Odell can’t keep the teasing smile out of his voice. “Damn, E, you’ve gotten hardcore since I was last in the city.”

“Oh, for sure,” Eli replies with a roll of his eyes. He sips at his mug of tea. “You think _that’s_ crazy, you should’ve seen me earlier in my career. Probably woulda loved me when I was younger.”

Maybe he’s still running on fumes from partying too hard with Jimmy the other night. Maybe it’s the comfort of his morning tea. Maybe it’s just his heart finally beating too loud in his chest, giving up on hiding. Whatever it is, it has Odell completely open. He chuckles at Eli’s words and shakes his head, a smile starting to play on his lips. “Nah, I love you just fine now.” And _oh_ —there it is. He doesn’t even realize he’d been thinking it until the last syllable leaves his mouth, and his eyes dart up to meet Eli’s. His face is—unreadable. The only sign of movement that Odell notices is that the mug has gone from his hands to his lips and back again.

“I—you know what I mean, E,” Odell sputters, suddenly wide awake despite not having drank a single ounce of his wake-up tea. “You’re—we’re brothers, man, I—”

“Shit,” Eli mutters softly, and Odell immediately stops talking. His stomach has twisted itself into a French braid and he thinks he may be ready to expunge it from his body. “I have a—gotta take a phonecall, Odell, I’ll be—thanks for the tea.” He’s out of the room before Odell can even come to terms with what’s happened.

It’s not like he’d expected Eli to reciprocate his feelings, right? He sits down at the island counter, head in his hands. It’s not even 9am and their entire day has come skidding to a halt. _I love you just fine now_. It’s probably the most honest he’s been with himself in a long time, and the words hadn’t felt _bad_ on his tongue but even still…

“ _Fuck_.” He presses the heels of his palms into his eyes and exhales slowly, trying not to completely shake apart from the almost vacant expression that had crossed Eli’s face. Moments before they’d practically been chest to chest, smiling softly at each other and drinking tea like it was routine for them, and now…one of his dogs saunters over to him and butts her head into his knee. “Hey, baby girl,” he murmurs quietly, roughing her ears up as she happily grumbles at his presence. Odell is suddenly so tired, though. Like his accidental confession had drained life out of him and the work ethic he’d been priding himself on season after season has suddenly dissipated. It makes him a little sick, to be honest.

He texts his trainer about a good morning routine and, after letting Eli know via text where he’d be in case E needed him, throws himself into it. Better to be physically fit and mentally vacant than dwelling on unrequited romantic love, right? Or something to that effect. Odell would rather sweat bullets and work through ankle pain than ever look at Eli again.

That’s a lie, of course—a few hours later, right around lunchtime, Eli knocks on the door of Odell’s weight room and peeks his head in. He looks freshly showered and the expression on his face is apologetic. Odell feels himself drawn towards him even as his ankles strain underneath the weight machine he’s working on.

“Hey,” he says, his voice somehow cutting through the Drake track that’d been blasting through his speaker system. O shuts it off and they drown in the silence for several beats before Eli speaks up again. “I really did have a call, y’know. I wouldn’t—I’d never walk out on you out of nowhere like that, Odell. I’m sorry.”

How can Eli Manning be the goofiest looking man on Earth and still know exactly what to say and how to say it? “’s okay,” O replies. “I didn’t—I mean, I haven’t been sleeping well lately, so my brain is all whacked out ‘cause it’s tired as hell.” He cracks a half-smile and shakes his head. (It’s not a _complete_ lie.)

“Me too, man.” Eli crosses the room and sits down on the machine next to him. “Did you still want to run through those drills we talked through yesterday? ‘cause it looks real nice out right now.” The whole reason he’d flown out here in the first place—practice. It’s humbling in a way O doesn’t know if he needs right now.

“Yeah, it does.” He unhooks his legs from the weight lifting machine and hops to his feet, wincing a little at his stretched muscles. “Can we take it slow, though?”

Eli eyes him and nods, a smile slowly spreading across his face. “Sure, O. Anything you want.”

* * *

Truth be told, Odell doesn’t think Eli’d had a drill planned for them at all once they’re in his backyard. It’s too early in the offseason—especially with Shurmur, a man who Odell had actually wanted to learn under but was moved across the country before he had the chance—and as much as he knows Eli has playbook after playbook filed away in his brain, he realizes that all E had really wanted was someone to throw the ball with. Someone to catch his passes and push him harder, which floors Odell a little bit because he’s got Shep and Otto and Evan back east, all eligible receivers and all located closer than O’s LA home.

“Why’d you fly out here, E?” Odell asks, throwing the football back to Eli after a particularly high-speed pass. “I mean, ‘s nice to see you and all, but these drills are kind of…”

“You callin’ out the new offense?” Eli’s voice rises in mock surprise. He throws the ball back to Odell, another bullet straight into the receiver’s waiting hands. Odell rolls his eyes and pretends that his chest doesn’t constrict when he notices Eli talking to him like he’s still part of the team. “I dunno, O. Guess you’re still the only person I really trust to catch the ball.” He grins sheepishly. Even after all these years, seeing Eli smile so easily still takes Odell’s breath away a little.

“Nah, man,” Odell replies. “You got so many good dudes in New York.” It’s uncomfortable to talk about the Giants in such a detached way—he’s been a 9er for a month and a half, and it’s settled in for the most part, but he hasn’t quite been able to separate himself from his boys in blue. “Plus, Saquon! Kid’s a star. Y’all got yourselves a freight train and he’s barely old enough to drink.”

Eli nods at his words but doesn’t say anything in response for a few moments. He fiddles with the football now sitting in his hands. Then, when he throws it back to Odell, he says something that stops the world from turning. “You’re the best receiver I ever had.” The wind that gets knocked out of him isn’t from the force of the ball. Odell wishes he hadn’t heard him say it—wishes the wind had picked up and he’d only heard the tail end of his words instead of listening to them sound like a confession. Of _course_ he’d been Eli’s WR1 for four years and their dynamic had evolved as such—but for him to say this now? _Ever_? Eli has thrown to Victor Cruz and Mario Manningham, Plaxico Burress and Hakeem Nicks, _Super Bowl_ caliber men who the quarterback had leaned on and trusted to deliver. Odell had only been part of one winning season with Eli, and their Super Bowl run had ended almost as soon as it had begun. He’d been integral to keeping the team afloat, but nothing more. And yet…here’s Eli, standing in Odell Beckham Jr’s backyard like he hadn’t just travelled three thousand miles to toss a football with him, saying _you’re the best receiver I ever had_ like he has any business saying anything like that. Odell has been half in love with him for almost ten god damn years, fully committed to it a little less than 30 days before, and confessed it about two and a half hours ago; here’s everything he’s ever wanted out of this relationship, right in front of him, and he knows it’s not going to happen.

He doesn’t know how to respond, so he just throws the football back.

* * *

Eli leaves the next day. They don’t talk about Odell’s confession or Eli’s statement, or the thousands of miles that are about to separate them, or anything, really—they sit in Odell’s Ferrari at the airport, coffee in Eli’s hand and an egg-white sandwich in O’s, and then Odell waves him off as he climbs onto his 10am flight knowing everything.

He knows everything, now, and he didn’t choose to stay.

* * *

As if the week ahead couldn’t possibly get any worse, it’s number assignment day at the facility and Odell is no longer the center of the team’s receiving corps. Not that he _wanted_ to be, though it was what he expected based on the fact that the 9ers had _wanted_ to trade their first round pick for him; he arrives for non-contact practice on Monday and, upon walking up to his locker, notices the number 8 plastered to the top of his locker. Something about it rubs him the wrong way—the red is angry to begin with, and the full curve of the eight rather than the half-curve of the three in _13_ really is psyching him out. He picks the jersey up and pulls it over his chest, trying it on for size so-to-speak.

“It’s numbers week, man,” someone on the other side of the room says loudly. Odell looks up and directs his gaze to the face of Richard Sherman, who’s still sort of looking affectionately at the _25_ on his jersey. He eyes Odell’s in his hands and shrugs. “’s not about the number, though, OBJ. You’re still kickass without _13_ on your back.”

“Yeah,” Odell replies, but it sounds more tired than he means it to. _8_. It’s a little thing but it _bothers_ him, letting go of the thirteen that’s guided his career for four years. His last tie to New York has been severed after Eli’s quiet departure yesterday, and Odell thinks that’s what’s really upsetting him. Completely letting go.

“I didn’t think I’d ever leave Seattle,” Sherm says, suddenly sitting next to him. There’s something oddly reassuring about his presence, his experiences of just about everything somehow completely embodied in his physique. Also— _can he read minds?_ “Was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, ‘cause I loved it there more than anything, you feel? But things were changing in ways that I really couldn’t…” He shakes his head. “But it happened. Y’know? And I’m here now, and _shit,_ I’m probably about 3 weeks more tenured here than you are, but it’s gonna be okay.” He rests a reassuring hand on Odell’s shoulder. “You got plenty of time to love your old team, but you’re also here now.” Richard gets up and returns to his locker, grabs his water bottle, and then heads off to the weight room with a _bye!_ that tonally feels much different from the heavy topic they’d just been talking about.

Maybe it’s time to let go for real. He looks down again, at the scarlet jersey that’s sitting half-folded in his hands. _8_. Maybe he’ll make a new career out of it.

* * *

He texts one of his ESPN colleagues that he wants to be the comeback kid this season, mostly because of the lack of news about him since he’d first been sent across the country two-ish months before. It’s more of a favor to her anyway, since Josina had fought for him to not be traded for months after the Super Bowl; it’s been nice to be out of the New York spotlight, yeah, but he owes her one.

It’s no surprise that, on his phone’s ESPN app about an hour later, the “story” breaks—he rolls his eyes at the five articles that have sprung up about it, including one from one of the old Giants beat writers he’d been the target of in his last few weeks in New York. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he remembers the advice one of his former teammates had given him (a teammate who he doesn’t want to think about right now, because if he does it’ll just hurt): ‘dumb news is better than no news.’ It had been a warning for when he first got to East Rutherford, and the man who’d told him had been at the center of the local papers for almost a decade at the time—but Odell had taken it to heart, and now seeing Pat Leonard try to slander his name even after his tenure as a Giant has ended only makes him chuckle.

When he arrives at practice the next day, though, his teammates holler as he walks into the locker room. They’ve graciously given him the nickname ‘Comeback Kid’ and tease him about how he’s just being dramatic, and Odell finds himself actually laughing along with them. Something in his chest has lifted, he realizes, and he can high-five his receiving corps (whose names he’s _almost_ used to working alongside) without feeling guilty about leaving his former teammates behind. That day’s practice ends early, and as he’s packing his things to head back to rehab, Jimmy comes up behind him and claps a hand on his shoulder. O jumps a little, and his new quarterback laughs.

“Doin’ anything, comeback kid?” He asks, and Odell shakes his head—he’s ahead of his doctor’s schedule and the rest of the rehab, while mandatory, hasn’t been anything actually strenuous. “Cool. ‘Cause we’re thinking about doing some group workouts on the beach later, and since you’re the one pushing relationships and all…” he winks and nudges Odell’s arm, and he can’t help but feel a little bit flustered at the very obviously flirtatious tone the quarterback has taken. “It’ll be good for group dynamics. Team shenanigans and all that.”

“Team shenanigans?” Odell repeats incredulously, more to make fun of the phrase than to question the motive. Jimmy laughs and a bit of a blush colors his cheeks.

“ _Team_ shenanigans. So you gotta be there.” He slings an arm around Odell’s shoulders. “Deal?”

“Hey, if it’s mandatory…” O laughs. “Yeah, deal.”

“Sweet!” Jimmy removes his arm. “Hey, you want a ride there? I owe you for last week.”

Odell shakes his head and swings his Supreme bag over his shoulder. “Nah, man. ‘s all good. I’ll follow y’all there, yeah? Gotta give me the city tour and all that.” He grins and walks out to the parking lot, completely missing the way Jimmy’s face goes completely red.

True to his word, Odell waits in his car until he sees the guys pegged for their beach session—Jimmy, Marquise, Pierre, Jerick, Sherm, Robbie, and a bunch of rookies—pulling out of the facility lot in a line. O tags along at the back end of it, and as the San Francisco breeze rolls through his convertible, he realizes that what Richard had said to him the week before had been pretty spot-on. The hurt has slowly faded into something duller—still painful but a little bit less so.

The beach trip isn’t really anything training related, though that doesn’t actually surprise Odell all that much. He’s known his team for about two months and he can _already_ tell that they’re a group of guys who just want to have fun more than anything. They run a few routes, mostly because Jimmy asks nicely and then throws sand in their faces when they protest, and then spend the rest of the afternoon playing a game of pick-up football while the sun is still in the sky. It’s _fun_ , and for a moment it throws Odell off because he’s never really had any experience like this with his former team—boat trip be damned, he’d only really spent time with Shep and Vic and Roger, all part of the receiving corps. This is something new—he’s getting to know the rookie DEs that’d been drafted a couple days after he’d arrived, and it’s…he can’t quite put words to it.

Jimmy also insists on throwing _hard_ passes to him, ones that hit him in his bare chest and knock the wind out of him as he runs across the sand. He feels Sherm running behind him, catching up fast and laughing breathlessly, and so Odell detours towards the water. He can hear Jimmy’s laughter from all the way up on shore and it’s fun, it’s _fun_ —he trips and stumbles into the water, and Richard pulls up from his sprint to wheeze-laugh at him. Incredible.

“You okay, man?” He asks, reaching out a hand after a few moments. “Know that ankle’s a little tender and shit.”

“Hey, if your knee is good, my ankle’s better than good,” O replies, gratefully accepting the assistance and hoisting himself back up. He brushes some of the sand off of his chest and shoulder. “Damn.”

Richard bumps his fist into O’s still-sandy shoulder. “You lucky we ain’t got seashells all over Levi,” he answers with a grin, and Odell rolls his eyes. _Jackass_. The two of them jog back to where the rest of the guys are huddled up, and they continue their tiny pick-up game well into the evening, laughter and all.

* * *

The next two weeks have the same good energy with them. The beach practice, which has him a little sore from all the sea life that had managed to dig into his feet, had been an initiation of sorts; when he shows up to practice the next day, he can exchange a close, personal hello with each guy he’d been playing pick-up ball with, and it feels good. As he’d told his new quarterback, relationship building is the most important part this time of year, and Odell thinks he’s made a good first step.

He even finds himself getting closer to his coaches, which is more refreshing than he’d even realized it would be. After the previous season, where he’d witnessed his teammates completely collapse under a careless head coach, Odell had realized that, as important as maintaining structure and stability in a locker room is, it does nothing if there’s not at least some personal dynamic mixed in as well. Coach Shanahan is quick to text him ( _text_ him, not call him or email him) about updates to the route tree he’s building for the upcoming season, and remembers the little things—like that he has dogs, that his mom is trying to get him to switch to solely organic groceries, that there’s still a wound in his heart shaped like the big apple and it’s going to be there for a while. Odell feels _comfortable_ talking to him, something that he’s never really had in his NFL career before. (He’d liked coach Coughlin, of course, and the stories that Zak and Eli had told about him were entertaining and all, but there’d always been a sort-of disconnect—not quite discomfort, but more along the lines of _obligation_. Like he couldn’t quite unwind until he left the building. That sort of thing.)

It isn’t quite the same, of course, as the way things used to be. Something at the back of Odell’s mind quietly nags him about comparisons, about the way things looked in Metlife, about the presence of a certain MVP he’d been unable to forget about…he does his best to push the memories aside, but it doesn’t stop them from resurfacing, and it keeps that hole in his heart raw around the edges.

* * *

After his final set of practices for the month, with a full week to spare before July training begins, O decides to fly across the country to New York City. It’s quasi-spontaneous: he’s been hitting up the old receivers group chat they’d had going on during the 2016 season, Vic still in it and everything, and talking vaguely about visiting. The response he’d gotten was the one he had wanted, but Shep and Otto are still bound tight to their new coach’s schedule, and Victor’s been in-and-out of various ESPN podcasting sessions that he can’t even remember the _times_ of half the time, so nothing had been actually planned. But this free week feels like a blessing to Odell, and he’s ready to hop timezones again like he used to all the time last season; as great as LA and San Fran are, something about Manhattan always draws him back, always reminds him that the east coast is alive and ready for him whenever he wants. Of all the women that have been in his life, O thinks that the island of Manhattan still has him wrapped around her finger.

So he hits up his boys and lets them know that he’s headed their way. He’s flooded with a bunch of excited texts almost immediately, and before he can even finish typing out his plan, Shep is face-timing him. He accepts the call with a grin.

“O! Dude, _yes_!” The phone is too close to his face, and Odell can only make out his forehead and hairline. He chokes on a laugh. Somewhere behind his friend, he hears _hey, is that Odell?_ and then a crash, followed by a couple different sources of laughter.

Roger’s voice, muffled, is what he hears next. “Young savages ridin’ again!”

“Log in,” O replies with a smile, to the joy of his friends. “Hey, if y’all ain’t doin’ anything tonight, let’s grab dinner. My treat.”

Sterling laughs again and the image on Odell’s phone shakes and blurs. “Damn right ‘my treat’. Boy, you just got _paid_! Makin’ us rookie contracts fend for ourselves…god damn.” Odell rolls his eyes. “But yeah, dude, for sure. You, me, Otto here—” A blurry Shep hooks Roger into the camera’s line of sight. “And, hey, Saquon?” Odell nods but raises an eyebrow at the questioning tone. “Y’know, you’ve known this team the longest, man—gotta help us show the rookie what he’s in for.”

O smiles so wide he thinks his face is going to split in half. “Aw _shit_! Man, now I gotta think of places we gotta hit up if we’re takin’ the tour.” He rubs at his forehead pretending to think. “I’ll let y’all know when I land, yeah? It should be before 7, but y’never know. Delta.”

“Sounds good, man. See you soon.”

“See you soon, brudda.”

He hops on the 9:30am flight to JFK, pockets some Adderall to counteract the timezone change, and then sleeps his entire flight before arriving at 6:30pm. When he steps off the plane, he texts the chat and then orders his Lyft driver.

Sterling, ever a man of taste, picks a steakhouse for their reunion meal—in fact, it’s the same one that the two of them had gone to after he’d been drafted in 2015, and both of them had frequented it a lot during their 11-5 season. (This time, though, when Odell says _drinks on me_ it’s because of his new paycheck, not because his team had just managed to carve its way into the playoffs. Remembering that sets off a slight ache in his chest.) When they see each other from across the restaurant, Odell all but slow-motion runs through the sea of crowded tables to pull his friend into a tight hug. Roger is next, of course, but not before the three of them try to re-create their pre-game handshakes from what feels like a lifetime ago. Still sitting in the booth, Saquon beams up at them. Odell slides right in next to him and they knock shoulders.

“Long time no see, huh, rookie?” Odell asks with a teasing smile. The rookie nods, still smiling brightly at all of them.

“It’s been a while,” he agrees. To go along with the statement, he lightly clinks his glass of wine with Odell’s glass of ice water, and O can’t help but yell _CHEERS_ at the top of his lungs while the other two receivers giggle breathlessly on the other side of the table. Saquon almost chokes on the sip he’d been taking. When he finally swallows and coughs between fits of laughter, Odell claps him on the back affectionately. It feels like no time had passed at all between them, like he’d been part of this whole group the entire time and not an unspeakable distance away from them. At the thought, Odell’s heart sinks in his chest—however, when the tray of shots gets set down on their table between dishes, it’s quickly drowned out. They click their shot glasses together and cheer again, though a little less loudly, and their evening begins.

About $2500 worth of food and booze later, the four men step out onto the still-bustling street. Odell’s legs feel numb as he walks alongside his friends, laughing loudly but not really knowing much about what’s being said. He’s got an arm around Sterling and an arm around Saquon, and they’re both keeping him from tripping over his own two feet and the uneven New York City sidewalk. His heart is full.

“I _love_ you guys,” he says, not able to hear how slurred his words are. “I _miss_ you and ‘s real nice to be with you again.” He presses a wet, sloppy kiss to the side of Shep’s head, and Shep laughs so hard he doubles over and squeaks something about almost pissing himself. Odell just rolls his eyes and then reaches over to knock Roger in the shoulder. He’s the quietest of the four of them that night, but his eyes are glittering with excitement and he gives Odell a huge smile as they reach the crosswalk.

“What’re we doin’ tonight?” Saquon asks. He stumbles and leans up against Odell for support, who somehow manages to remain upright by himself for more than five minutes, and then links their arms together for a moment. It’s sweet, O thinks in hindsight—that this rookie he’s known for months and months now trusts him enough to walk him through the busiest part of Manhattan after midnight and many, _many_ drinks. (He wishes he’d get the chance to play alongside him.)

Odell doesn’t actually remember what they do that night. It’s mostly a blur, full of laughter and a little more alcohol, but he more remembers hanging on his friends (and his friends hanging on him, too) and stumbling through the crowded city, trying not to get the attention of the paparazzi and, for the most part, succeeding. He wakes up in his hotel room he doesn’t remember booking and his head _throbs_. Light is spilling through the fabric covering his windows, and he takes caution in opening them just a little before crawling back into bed and looking at his phone.

 **yung shep** : yo  
**yung shep** : u get back aight?

It had been sent an hour or so ago, and Odell smiles—always the early riser, even after road losses in hotels no one remembered the name of. He types out a quick response.

 **o** : all good brudda. ty for last night  
**yung shep** : any time my man. missed u during OTAs ;-D  
**o** : fuck outta here man  
**o** : last offszn can kiss my ass  
**yung shep** : LOL  
**yung shep** : hey r u doing anything 2day? come visit metlife w/me

Odell feels something cold in his stomach curl. _Metlife_. He’s not sure he’s ready to go back to his old stomping grounds—not all that old, but just as weighty—for a visit. A little voice in his head says _ELI WILL BE THERE_ but that just makes him want to turn away even more. He doesn’t think he’ll be able to even be in the same _building_ as his former quarterback, let alone reconnect with him on a whim.

 **o** : sorry dude, recovery from last nite then rehab later :/

It’s not a _complete_ lie—he’s exhausted still, and he’s pretty sure he’ll die in the next 20 minutes if he doesn’t get _something_ in his stomach to evade the worst effects of a hangover. He hopes Sterling doesn’t take it personally, and once he gets an ‘ _o well, next time’_ text, he books his ticket back to the west coast. It’s impulse. Thinking about being in the same space as the man he’s been in love with for what feels like _forever_ makes him queasy.

O’s flight back to LAX leaves the day after, and when he arrives home, he immediately climbs into his shower and lets the weekend melt off of him. He definitely doesn’t hit the wall with his flat palm. He definitely doesn’t cry thinking about how easy getting back into the swing of things with his old friends had been. He definitely doesn’t think about what he would’ve done if he’d taken Shep up on his offer.

Instead, he takes a power nap, and then hits up Pierre and Jerick to see if they want to get some reps in before prep for July camp begins.

* * *

 

He's out hanging with his teammates at a pre-preseason party when his phone goes off. He doesn’t answer it, of course, because he’s currently yelling at the top of his lungs for Weston to finish off the _keg_ he brought (“What are we, college kids?” “Are you complaining?” “Fuck nah, bro.”) and laughing so hard his sides feel like they’re splitting. Drunk as hell and hanging out in Jimmy Garoppolo’s mini-mansion, it’s easy to ignore the buzzing device in his pocket.

It’s only when he wakes up mid-day the next morning, hungover and _still_ tired, that he sees the call in the first place. He rolls his eyes—it’d probably been his agent, or maybe his mom calling about flying out to meet him later in the month. He’s been going hard on the field since mandatory practice had rolled around and told her he’d bring her in for a couple days, to relax and everything. With a lazy motion, Odell scrolls through the notifications he has, swiping through Instagram update after Instagram update until he reaches the little missed call symbol.

He almost drops his phone. _1 Missed Call from: E_. His stomach turns, though Odell thinks it’s more than partially because of the drinking he’d done the night before, as he sees the little notification underneath it: _1 New Voicemail_.

“Oh, shit.” The words come out of Odell’s mouth before he even knows he’s saying it. No one else is around him to echo him—not like anyone would be able to in the first place, because no one else _knows_ —but he still feels exposed, for a second. Like listening to this, whatever the minute-and-a-half-long message sitting in his inbox is, is going to completely tear him apart. (Why is it still so easy for Eli to do this? To shake him to pieces without even being there in the first place?)

The timestamp on the voice message is 10:26pm, which means… _almost 1:30 in the morning on the east coast_. Fingers suddenly trembling, he presses play on it.

“Hey, O.” Immediately something in his chest tightens. Eli’s voice is low and languid, as always, but it sounds a little less in control than before. 1:30am sounding like this only means that Eli Manning had been drunk when he’d called, which only seems to twist the knife in his stomach deeper. “Hey, ‘s, uh, it’s Eli. You prob’ly know that already, ‘cause you’ve got caller ID and didn’t pick up, so uh.” He clears his throat, and Odell’s heart is falling out of his chest already. “I just wanted to call and, uh, apologize. Y’know. For everything. ‘s not…’m sorry y’got traded, _Oh_ -dell.” His accent is thick like this, almost sounding as if he’s tongue-tied. “I shouldn’t’ve left you like I did back in May, ‘cause it wasn’t fair to you at all and that’s…for someone who considers you one of the most important…I shouldn’t’ve done that. And I’m sorry.”

“E…” Odell can’t help but talk back to him. “E, it wasn’t your fault…”

“I just, y’know. You were on my mind, ‘n I wanted to, uh, reach out. But you’re out, so I guess…hey, I hope you’re havin’ fun with your new team. The niners are real lucky to have you, O. I sure as hell know I’d take you back here in a heartbeat, no questions asked, but ‘s just me.” He chuckles in a quasi-self-depreciating way and that might be the bit that gets to Odell the most—the sad laughter. He’s heard it too many times in his lifetime and he _hates_ that he’s the cause of it now. “You’re gonna be great this season, man. I’m real excited to see you play. You deserve every penny of that contract they gave you and more. Uh, guess I’ll stop chattin’ up your voicemail now, but I just wanted to…” he lingers into silence. “Yeah. G’nite, O.” The soft _click_ of Eli’s thumb hitting the ‘end call’ button fills Odell’s ears, and as the voicemail operator reminds him of the varying options he has for dealing with the message, he feels numb with Eli’s words.

Something in his stomach turns again, this time unbearably so—he rushes to his bathroom and spits up Eli’s words, _I’d take you back no questions asked_ , _you were on my mind_ , _oh-dell_ , chokes on them as they resurface in his ears and in his stomach like bile. (What would he have done if he’d answered the call?)

Odell crawls back into bed, texts his chef something about needing food, and then replays the message that makes him sick to his stomach. Listens to it again and again and again.

 _You’re the best receiver I ever had_. _You were on my mind_. How is Odell supposed to not be in love with this? With him? With the organization he’d left behind and _thought_ he’d gotten over? His chest aches in the worst way. Maybe, he thinks, if he died right here and now, it wouldn’t be so bad—at least the pain would be gone.

* * *

 

And yet, practice the next day feels no different. Jimmy runs through routes with him and the rest of the receiving corps, tries to include Victor even though his suspension has really started to sink in with the rest of the team. He lifts weights, he memorizes plays and calls, he pushes his rehab as hard as it can go because he’s in the final stages of healing, and _nothing_ changes even though two nights ago, Eli Manning had called him on a whim because he wanted to talk. To say sorry. It’s like a fog that he can’t seem to move past—Odell feels like two different people, one in the moment running around with his teammates in red, one trapped in New York under the lights with the man he still loves, _still_ , and it’s so draining that Odell can only pull into his driveway after practices and collapse onto his couch. July passes almost exactly like this—day after day of camp, getting in-tune with his teammates, fully becoming a San Francisco 49er and taking pictures with fans around the city. They start to blur together, which scares Odell a little bit.

He dates one of the girls he’d met at his first bar night with Jimmy for a couple weeks, but it’s not serious and he knows that they’re both really in it for the sex. It ends as quickly as it had begun, and Odell doesn’t really feel bad about it. In fact, he hasn’t really felt much of anything at all. _This_ is the part that really scares him; he hasn’t stopped feeling the same way that he had flat on his back the afternoon he’d listened to that voicemail. His body has been on football autopilot for camp purposes since…well, since Eli had left back in May, if he’s being honest with himself. He’d forgotten for a while and started to fall into this new, full-time life on the west coast, but all it had taken was one call…

“Odell,” one of the local reporters asks on a media day of camp. “How has your transition been to this team so far?” It’s a fairly straightforward question, and to be fair, he hasn’t really been asked it that much—people ask more about Jimmy, or about his ankle, or about his offseason shenanigans—not about this. He smiles a little, ducks his head.

“This team’s welcomed me with open arms, and I’m just, I’m real grateful to be here.” He rubs the back of his neck. “The transition has been a little weird—no more east coast time,” he jokes, which gets a chuckle from the cameras positioned in front of his face, “and a lot more sunshine. Coach Shanahan has been really helpful in incorporating me into the offense, and Jimmy G has been—well, y’all know how he is.” Another laugh from the crowd, and Odell smiles, though it’s not entirely real. He can feel the quarterback’s gaze on him and nods his head towards him, a quasi-shout-out. “I can’t wait to get back out on that field, though. That’s what all this is about.”

That last part, at least, is fully true. He’s missed football more than just about anything, give or take a few things, and even if he’s wearing another uniform he’d never even _thought_ about before, he feels blessed that he still gets to play.

His mom flies in one weekend in late July, and they go to church together. Somewhere small, somewhere quiet, and Odell just sits and absorbs the pastor’s words as he talks about God’s gifts and the blessings he bestows upon every person on Earth. His mom holds his hand and squeezes it gently, and something inside him cracks open, raw and unfiltered. Tears streaming down his face, he falls apart quietly in the pew at the back. God is cleansing his aching heart, he thinks—cleansing it for new beginnings, just around the corner.

* * *

 

Less than a week out from their first preseason game—the _Cowboys_ , of all the teams in the league they could’ve gone up against—and suddenly Odell is jittery again, like it’s his first career game under the lights. In a way, it sort of is: wearing a new color, sporting a new logo, working under the mentorship of a new quarterback, it’s kind of similar to that first game he’d played back in 2014, several weeks in because of his hamstring. This is a new kind of jitter, though—at least before, he’d known his quarterback beyond the handful of weeks they’d worked together in the preseason. Now, he feels like he’s going in blind, and as excited as he is to have been cleared for play by several doctors, part of him can’t help but overthink. All of the pressure from New York had been lifted, but…for what? For him to play with the next big QB sensation and, once again, draw the spotlights on his play? (He’d rather _that_ than be heckled for his personal life, but it’s more of a rock-and-a-hard-place type of choice.)

He’s got his headphones on sitting in the locker room when he feels Jimmy walk up to him. It’s a strange thing, really—they’d been acquaintances at _best_ barely two months ago, and yet now they’ve spent enough time together for Odell to know that the decked-out 9er red sneakers in front of him could belong to no one else, if only because they’re so blatantly San Fran. He looks up into Jimmy’s face from the seat in front of his locker and grins, holds out a fist for Jimmy to tap with his own. “’sup, G?”

“What’s happenin’, O?” He pulls up the seat next to his—Pierre’s, but he doubts that the other receiver is going to care at all. “You look like you’re thinking.”

“Oh, do I?” Odell teases. Jimmy laughs, a blush coloring his cheek, and it’s cute, O thinks. How flustered his new quarterback is, how easy it is to make him blush even at the silliest of comments…his thoughts begin to connect the dots to another familiar figure but Odell stops them before they can continue. “Seriously, though, it’s nothing. ‘m just thinking about Thursday.”

At the mention of their first preseason game, Jimmy lights up. “Me too, man. It’s gonna be so exciting—having you out here under the lights with the rest of us is going to be…” He trails off but the smile still sits on his face. “I mean, Sherm too, and the guys that we pulled in over the offseason, but I think…” Jimmy lowers his voice. “I think you’re the one I’m most excited about seeing.” Odell whacks his shoulder lightly. “What?”

“Man, you’re biased as hell.” He shakes his head. Jimmy is still red in the face with blush, but it seems to keep happening, and _cute_ is the only word at the forefront of his mind, god dammit—“Besides, it’s my first game as a 9er and I gotta say. I’m nervous as fuck.”

“Nervous?” The quarterback sounds a little incredulous. “Odell, you’re—shit, man, you’re one of the best in the game right now, and you’ve got a clean slate and a fresh new contract. You have nothing to be worried about.” He pauses. “Actually, uh, now that I say it out loud, I get it.”

Odell laughs despite himself. “Yeah, man. Plus…” He gestures at his ankle. “It’s all healed up and everything, but I can’t help but think, y’know, what if it happens again?”

“I won’t overthrow you this time,” Jimmy deadpans. Clearly he’s expecting Odell to laugh at the little jab, but instead Odell just shakes his head, manages a half-smile at best but doesn’t take his eyes off his ankle. The implication that it’d been Eli to get him hurt is one that makes him feel a little sick, because that _wasn’t_ the case, it was a route they’d run hundreds of times before, and this just happened to be the one…

“I dunno.” O feels like a little kid saying it, like he’s got a big test in two days and all he can do is just stare at his feet.

“Hey.” Jimmy knocks a fist gently into Odell’s shoulder as the quiet settles between them. “You’re gonna be great, O. You’re one of the best receivers I’ve ever _seen_.” A statement too uncomfortably close to the one that had set him off months before. “Look, if you’re not doing anything tonight, let’s go get a drink or two. Settle the nerves and all that. Yeah?”

Odell turns to look at him and finds that the quarterback had been closer than he’d expected. They almost bump noses, and he laughs it off but can’t _not_ notice Jimmy’s eyes, the way they’re searching his face. (He’s earnest, Odell will give him that.) He nods after a moment or two. “Yeah, why not. You’re buying, right?” Jimmy laughs quietly in reply.

“So much for that big ol’ contract you just got, huh,” he answers, pushing himself up onto his feet and reaching a hand out to help Odell up. “I’ll pay if you drive us in that nice little Ferrari you got.”

“Picking up chicks tonight, Jimothy, are we?” Odell winks, but the blush on Jimmy’s cheeks surfaces _again_ and it’s hard to keep ignoring it because O doesn’t think he’s being intentionally flirtatious. Unless he is? His brain is too jumbled with worry to put any effort into the thought. “Yeah, I’ll bring her. You just bring your wallet, man.” (They both know that either way they’ll be getting free drinks, as always.)

* * *

 

Jimmy kisses him after drink seven. Not that Odell’s counting, not that it matters, but it’s after the quarterback drains his seventh beer that all of a sudden O’s lips are occupied with someone else’s. It’s funny, he thinks in a dark way—he’s spent the past four months since being traded thinking about another quarterback, spent the past couple years being _in love_ with him, and here he is now with his starting passer, the most expensive contract on the market right now, in his face, trading tongues because he’s drunk and he wants this.

And Odell’s not—he’s not blind. He thinks Jimmy is handsome, and his smile does make him think that being weak in the knees for him isn’t such a bad thing. So he kisses back. Briefly, since they’re still sort of in public, but he lets himself into it because at this point, if he’s going to be the player he used to be in New York this season, he has to build on their developing chemistry the fast way. They part for air, Jimmy’s eyes dark with anticipation, chest heaving a little, and the smirk on his face is dangerous.

“I’ve been waiting to do that for weeks,” he says, still in O’s space, one hand still pressed almost painfully into his thigh (which, _oh_ , Odell doesn’t mind) as he talks. “You’re— _christ_.” He leans in a little further so that their noses brush, so that their foreheads bump, and it’s almost intimate except for the fact that somewhere in the back of Odell’s mind is a little voice screaming _this is the wrong quarterback_. He ignores it easily, though—Jimmy is warm and powerful and _here_ , and so his own lidded gaze falls fully on his new quarterback with a hazy, unbothered smile.

“Yeah?” He murmurs teasingly. Dipping in for another one, Odell makes sure their lips brush together teasingly for a moment before immersing himself in it again. His new quarterback tastes like the beer they’d just been pounding back and something sweet—vanilla? He’s persistent, too, which gets Odell a little hot and bothered. The hand on his thigh is slowly moving upwards, drawing him deeper and deeper from this dingy bar and into San Francisco’s human form. He’s not sure why he’s trembling, or why he even wants or needs something like this so badly all of a sudden, but Jimmy can tell and, as they part from their (technically) second beer-induced kiss, he pulls away and takes Odell’s hand.

“You wanna—?” His voice is low, a little bit gruff as if he hadn’t talked in a while. Odell doesn’t think they’ve been going at it that long but he doesn’t even really care anymore because yes, he _does_ want to get out of here, he _does_ want to leave with his handsome quarterback who he could maybe even become romantically attached to. He nods and they leave, climb into O’s Ferrari that they’d arrived in, and drive off.

Or, well, they drive for maybe five minutes before Odell realizes two things: he is very horny, and he is equally as drunk. So, instead of driving recklessly and daring the universe (and the police) to catch him, he pulls into a quasi-abandoned parking lot and pulls Jimmy into his embrace and says _fuck me_ because he can, because he’s ready for it here and now in the back of his own god damn sports car, ready to be manhandled even just a little bit. For the first time since he’d first been traded, Odell thinks he genuinely wants to be here.

Jimmy climbs on top of him in the back seat with his handsome and devilish smile, already peeling his own shirt off. “’s this what you want?” (A funny echo of his own thoughts.) Voice still husky and low, he leans down for another kiss as Odell shifts underneath him, grateful that he’d been working on flexibility in rehab, and more generally since he entered the league. He finds himself unable to reply verbally, so he settles for an affirmative whine, one that Jimmy understands better when Odell reaches out to press a hand flat to his firm set of abs.

“Yeah,” he affirms a few beats late, after Jimmy’s lips are already at his jaw, his neck, his collarbone, teeth scraping the skin a little bit from the intensity of the moment between them. Odell feels a little dizzy with it, with desire and something else a little less affectionate mixing in his stomach; they keep kissing and both of them end up undressed, though he can’t really remember how, and by the time the quarterback actually pushes inside him, his mind has completely given in to the sensations.

Except it hasn’t fully—he can’t stop thinking about Eli as Jimmy Garoppolo pounds into him, sweat-soaked and otherwise beautiful looking in the flood of moonlight pouring through Odell’s back windshield. Why hadn’t he _fought_ for Odell? He didn’t have to be in love with him to fight to keep his best receiver, didn’t have to fuck him or touch him or even hold his god damn hand to tell Dave that, _no_ , they _need_ Odell here. The bitterness strikes O in the heart at around the same time Jimmy hits the spot deep inside him. He moans and the other man eats it up, kisses the sound off his lips as he continues. Odell’s eyes drift over the little clock on his dashboard, still lit up, and when he sees _1:45_ flash up in crisp white LED form, he can’t help but think that it’s almost 5am on the east coast, that Eli is probably sound asleep or about to wake up for his workout, and that Odell’s not going to be there when he gets to MetLife later in the morning.

“So good for me,” Jimmy grunts between thrusts, voice ragged around the edges as he continues to kiss and touch Odell everywhere he possibly can. “Feels so good, baby, this feels—this feels—” But Odell can’t hear him anymore because he’s suddenly angry, suddenly _so_ angry at his home team for letting him go so easily. For what, a _tackle_? He couldn’t even count the number of times he’d carried the entire god damn offense to a victory it had been such a common theme, and their new GM just decided to _trade_ him? Eli’s words are still ringing in his ears from when they’d met up back in May, _you’re the best receiver I ever had_ , and if he’d really meant it then how could he have let this happen? Flooded with adrenaline, he pulls Jimmy into a brutal kiss, one that’d been rattling inside him for months, he thinks later, lip biting and the clashing of teeth and a bruising grip that both of them know will be there long after sunrise.

Jimmy comes in him moments later, growling his name and filling the car with his low whining as he bucks to a stop. As he finally comes down, he immediately begins to jerk Odell off. He’s slow from exhaustion and intoxication, and his grip isn’t as tight as O wants it to be, but it doesn’t matter because his cock is still desperately leaking, a multitude of sensory overloads blinding him to anything but the feeling of Jimmy’s not-quite-calloused palm rubbing him up and down again and again—

 _You’re the best receiver I ever had_ , Eli says again, voice soft and eyes crinkly, and Odell orgasms with a surprised gasp, splattering himself with come and pretending that the quarterback fielding this play was the one from back east, with a goofy smile and a southern accent and a heart of gold. He shouldn’t be thinking of Eli when he lets go, but he _is_ , and when the two of them have sobered up enough for Odell to drive Jimmy home, there’s a pang in his chest that he can’t quite push down. (How could Eli have let this happen?)

* * *

 

Odell wakes up the next morning slowly. For a moment, he forgets what had gone on the night before as he rolls out of bed—but as soon as he pushes to his feet, the ache in his body from being fucked in the back of his own car brings the memories flooding back. He moans under his breath as he shuffles into his bathroom, reminders of Jimmy G’s youth and power radiating through his limbs with every step, but eventually he reaches the bathroom. He fumbles with his phone while putting on his shower playlist, and then practically collapses into it, bracing himself against the cool gray marble wall as he attempts to twist the knob all the way to the left. Gratefully, the water immediately sprays hot, and in no time at all the bathroom is flooded with hot air and steam from the temperature and pressure. Odell can only half-sob in it as it soaks him completely—he stands still as it gushes down his back, unrelenting jets pounding against his shoulder blades as the grunge of last night starts to fade. As he lathers himself in soap, Odell rests his head against the wall again, allowing it to center his focus. _What_ had happened last night?

Well, his new quarterback had come onto him and they’d had sex in the back of his car. Odell still can’t stand right and he feels like he has to power-clean to get all of the filth off of him, not to mention what he’ll have to do to his backseat. But it’s more than that—for a split second, O realizes that he’d felt desire. Felt _want_ , felt hungry for something for the first time in months. Jimmy had kissed his neck, dragged his teeth along the sharp jut of his collarbone, and he’d _wanted_ him to keep going. The chill that crawls up his spine at the vivid memory makes him shiver even as steam has completely filled his bathroom, and a twinge of desire curls in his belly for a moment before he remembers what had gotten him over the edge after all of the buildup.

His stomach drops, and the wind gets knocked out of him like he’s been punched. Eli’s voice surfaces in his mind again, quiet and unsuspecting, ‘ _I just wanted to…_ ’ like he’d been meaning to say something else, _anything_ else. It aches to reach over and turn the water off even though Odell knows said ache is no longer physical. He lingers in the shower for a little while longer and just…breathes. Today is the beginning of a new chapter of his career, and he knows it will take a little while to recover after the week he’s just had. So he breathes, and he dries himself off, and he tells himself that today is the day.

All showered and ready for his small-screen comeback, he throws together his uniform and cleats—specially made for the new season as always, because KO is the best—in the closest bag to his front door and then tosses it into the backseat of his car. He shivers at the suddenly too-familiar smell and rolls the top down before heading out to Levi. He blasts Aubrey’s new album as he speeds down the 405, tapping his steering wheel and bobbing his head as memories of football blossom in his mind. It’s been so long since he’s run a route, let alone even put the pads on before getting to the field, and the excitement is clattering around in his chest waiting to be uncaged. The thrill of football again has him trembling, even after what he thinks may be up there in consideration for ‘worst offseason ever’.

When he pulls into the stadium parking lot, he can feel the energy from outside the building. Odell had watched San Francisco last season, seeing as he’d been couch-bound for over ten weeks, and had gotten a chance to see what Coach Shanahan and Jimmy Garoppolo had been able to do in the last six games of the season—he could feel the potential bleeding through the _screen_ at the time, and he hadn’t even known what his own future would hold back then. So to be walking in today with _that_ uniform sitting in his bag, waiting to be worn and used even for only a snap or two? It feels like the entire property is vibrating on a completely different level. Reaching the locker room is on another level, too—he walks in and is immediately greeted by grinning teammates, all offering fist-bumps and handshakes as if they’re about to go off to war. It’s contagious, this joy, and Odell can’t help but fall into the feverish pace that they’ve set. And then he sees Jimmy from across the room, and the fever suddenly intensifies.

“’sup, O,” he says while making the rounds through the locker room. They bump fists, and for a moment, Jimmy allows his fingers to lightly trail up Odell’s wrist. It’s barely a second of contact, something that Odell definitely could’ve missed had they not been pressed together the night before in the car that O had driven here today, but Odell can’t tear his eyes away from it as it happens, and flashes of their evening resurface, blending excitement for football with sexual energy that, frankly, he likes more than he lets on. But the moment passes as quickly as it had come on, and then they’re all together in the middle of the room, hollering in excitement, a pre-huddle before their actual huddle out on the field. It’s electric, and time simultaneously stops and speeds past as they run out onto the field to the cheers of a scarlet ocean waving for them. It takes Odell’s breath away.

The game, of course, doesn’t turn out to be much, seeing as it’s week one of preseason and, in accordance with his absolutely tumultuous season last year, everyone is worried about unnecessary injury. He does play for a series, though, the first drive of the game, and running through blindingly white Dallas jerseys only to turn around and catch a pass thrown like a bullet reminds him of what he’d been missing for all this time. In fact, he almost cries as he jogs back to the huddle at his return to the field—he almost feels whole again.

They make it to the 30 yard line and stall, forcing the special teams unit onto the field to collect their three points, and Odell high-fives Robbie when he aces the kick, but it doesn’t change anything—football is _back_ , universe be damned, and things are going to be better this time around. No three-win seasons this time around, no football coaches masquerading as football geniuses, no more unwarranted benchings…the thought sends a pang of sadness through him, and after the game, he opens Google and searches New York’s preseason schedule. On that Saturday night, four hours before kickoff, Odell thinks about them, his home team even after all the time he’s spent away. Instinct has him pulling Eli’s contact information up on his phone, but after a few moments of anxiety about what to say, he shakes his head and scrolls down to where Sterling’s number sits, practically twinkling in its non-threatening presence. He exhales a little as he taps the ‘message’ button and sends his well wishes across the country.

Shep texts back a few minutes later with a series of emojis and a “welcome back, brudda” as if reminding him that he _still_ is part of the circle of friendship they’d developed with Roger and Saquon and the rest of the offense. His heart aches at the thought, at how much his friends love him, and he texts Shep accordingly. He doesn’t get a response, but he’s not worried, because he _knows_ the routine that the offense is probably going through right now, especially when testing both new offensive _and_ defensive schemes as well as a new set of coaches. He smiles a little at that and then tosses his phone onto his bed. Of all the things for Odell to be doing, thinking about the Giants—who are viable competition as soon as they step out onto the field in Metlife—is probably far from the most important things he should be doing right now. So he flips through the playbook he’d taken home the day before, and while stretching for his own workout/rehab routine, refocuses his mind somewhere else. Surprisingly, it’s not as difficult as it used to be.

* * *

 

Most of preseason follows this general routine—Odell gets hyped with the rest of his teammates, he plays a snap or two of actual football, and then he stands on the sidelines and takes the rest of it in. It’s an educational experience, he thinks at one point, learning how to interact with this new fanbase and simultaneously act as a quasi-veteran player for younger practice squad receivers to look up to and talk to. It’s new, it’s exciting, and it keeps Odell on his toes for almost the entirety of August.

Of course, on the side, he keeps track of the Giants, because as much as he’s trying to distance himself from his past, there’s something about being on the opposite coast and having no information about them at all that’s driving him a little up the wall. _It’s like dealing with an ex_ , Pierre had joked with him earlier in the week, _you gotta see if they’re doing as well as you are or if they’re, you know, still stuck on your ass_. Odell had laughed, but he really hadn’t been wrong—especially in relationship to his quarterback, who he’d parted ways with in a rather unceremonious way. So he spends the time between weight rep sessions and team bonding activities watching highlights and scrolling through various former teammates’ twitters. It’s a weird feeling, being this distant—but then again, he imagines that a lot of them are doing the same for him, keeping tabs to see how his rehabilitative development has been going since they’d last interacted.

In his browsing, however, he comes across a particular clip of Eli throwing to Saquon and has to pause it because all of a sudden, a wave of unbelievably potent jealousy washes over him. He can’t explain it at all; he’s _friends_ with Saquon and Eli, he’s still a fan of the Giants even though he’s not part of the organization anymore, and he’s no longer restricted from playing football. Nothing in the clip itself had actually been anything worth the violently green feeling that had just overcome him. And yet, here he is sitting on his bed, staring at his phone, bristling as he watches the perfect connection form on the RB route they’d been talking about running for _seasons_ , now. The rookie ‘back practically coasts across the field and gains almost 45 yards, and in the brief moments of film before the replay, Odell sees Eli jog up to him and bump helmets with him. The green coils tight inside of him. _It’s normal for quarterbacks to interact with their players like this_ , he tells himself, _it’s nothing out of the ordinary_. And yet it feels like he’s watching the last intimate thing they’d had together be torn away from him, all while he willingly tunes in because _damn_ his curiosity.

He can’t even bother finishing his search, just swipes the app away and leans more heavily on the kitchen counter he’s standing near. A wave of exhaustion crashes over him and all he wants to do is cry. The image of Eli and Saquon bumping helmets, even though it’d been something innocent and completely platonic, is burned into Odell’s brain, and he hates that it’s all he can think about. It’s such a small thing— _such_ a small thing—but he can’t bring himself to reconcile it because he remembers being the one on the other end of that helmet bump. He remembers listening to Eli’s excited giggle overtake the noise of the crowd, remembers feeling his quarterback’s hands on his helmet in celebration, remembers the way his heart had always been in his throat at knowing that the two of them were so in sync on the field they were like one smoothly-run machine.

The last time he’d felt those hands on his helmet had been almost a year ago. The thought shakes Odell to his core, and for the rest of that afternoon, the progress he’d made with accepting San Francisco into his heart is completely dissolved. The rawness of his memories in New York chokes him. The sight of Eli connecting with someone else the way he’d once been connected to him makes him feel sick. And on top of all of that, his knowledge that he _shouldn’t_ be doing this makes it about ten times worse. He feels like a child for the second time that month, petty energy and jealousy coursing through him as if he has any right to feel either of those things. The decision had been more than final, and he’d been doing such a good job at investing himself in his _new_ team, in the organization that had actually wanted him (ouch) and paid top-dollar for him to sign there. There hadn’t been anything explicitly unfair through the entire process but Odell still feels like it’s been one long bad trip to the playground. He just wants to go home, just wants to be back in comfortable blue, just wants to hear his quarterback’s thick southern drawl call a play and clap his hands and orchestrate a miracle the way he’d done so many times before. He wants and he wants and he _wants_. He does not get.

The 9ers group chat _ding_ s on his phone, but he sets it to Do Not Disturb mode and instead takes a long, cleansing shower. The hot water soothes his muscles but doesn’t really do much else.

* * *

 

The flight out to Minnesota for week one’s game is an early one—coach Shanahan has them out there Thursday so that they can properly adjust to the timezone change, but even then, their flight leaves LAX at 9, which means Odell has to be up and out of his house before 7 if he wants to make it to the facility on time. It isn’t hard to stay awake, though; his excitement about the game has been boiling in his gut, spreading through his bloodstream and prickling at his fingertips since September 1st. He’s sipping on his tea as he strides into the building, pulling his luggage behind him and finding himself unable to bite back the smile on his face. From the looks of it, everyone else is just as excited to get back into the swing of things.

He ends up sitting next to Jimmy on the bus to the airport, who’s a little red in the face as he plops down. Odell just grins at him. “Been waitin’ _God_ knows how long for this,” he says, and Jimmy nods in agreement.

“Hell yeah, dude. Gotta prove the haters wrong.” The smile that forms on his face is big and genuine, and pretty, too—he’s not sure where he stands with the quarterback after their weird one-off session in the back of his car, but he can’t help but feel a twinge of desire somewhere inside him at the look on his face. After what’s probably too long of a pause, Odell makes an agreeing sound in his throat and holds out his fist for Jimmy to bump, who obliges and even makes a little exploding sound as their hands part. O giggles.

The bus ride to the airport is faster than he thought it would be, but he spends more time in the airport than he’d initially thought he would. Fortunately, his teammates make the wait easier, and they’re flying out to Minnesota within two hours of arriving at the terminal. Inadvertently, Odell finds himself seated next to Jimmy again—however, Jimmy is asleep not even ten minutes into the flight. It’s cute, O thinks—and then pushes the thought aside because it’s not _professional_ and he has to break his habit of being attracted to starting quarterbacks who he has no shot at maintaining an actual relationship with. But then Garoppolo’s head lolls to the side and rests on Odell’s shoulder, and he finds it a little bit difficult to keep his feelings completely professional.

They arrive at the hotel around 5:00, the timezone shift in full effect as the entire squad seems to be completely exhausted at check-in. Coach Shanahan reminds them that pre-game practice is Friday afternoon, and that they shouldn’t be getting themselves into any trouble beforehand or afterwards; then he lets them go and tells them to get a good night’s sleep, ‘cause they’ll need it. Odell doesn’t need to be told twice—he orders room service once he reaches the suite, and as soon as he finishes eating, he passes out on the bed before he even has time to change out of his flight clothes. The sleep is heavy and dreamless, and most importantly, guilt-free—the regular season is about to start and he’s finally, _finally_ moving on.

Practice the next day is great, albeit a little slow at the beginning to account for time-change. Running at full speed and being able to cut sharply in drills has him eager and full of adrenaline. He’s catching passes from Jimmy like he’d been doing it for longer than a couple months, and everyone’s reminding him of this— _you were meant to be here_ is the gist of their commentary, and though it hurts a little to think that, it’s a genuinely nice compliment that he fully appreciates.

Once the session officially ends, the team gathers in the hotel lobby and spends a couple of hours just talking to each other. Reviewing tape, going over route signals, or just catching up about life, Odell finds himself watching this young team connecting in a way he wouldn’t have imagined. The face of their franchise is sitting with a couple of third-string rookies and is genuinely chatting with them, and from what Odell can tell, it’s just the way that Shanahan and the 9ers run their organization. No pedestals. No contract is big enough to warrant isolation from the rest of the team. It’s breathtaking.

Of course, as if that’s the only thing that takes his breath away. He’s getting ready to head back up to his room and shower when the quarterback saunters up to him, that same genuine smile sitting on his face. “Where you headed, Odell?” At the surface, it sounds innocent and unsuspecting, but Odell has seen a side of Jimmy that he doesn’t think anyone else on the team has. There are lingering undertones of flirtatiousness in his question, as if he’s got a suggestion for where he _could_ be headed.

“Back to my room,” O replies, forcing himself to sound casual. “Gotta shower off the sweat and dirt from earlier, y’know?”

“Yeah…” Jimmy just looks at him for a moment, nods. And then: “Hey, I’ll walk back up with you.” He pauses again. “We can run through routes and stuff. Y’know, practice makes perfect and all that.” He grins and knocks his shoulder into Odell’s, and all O can do is just nod in agreement.

They walk back to the lobby elevator and, to Odell’s surprise, they _do_ talk about routes. Jimmy kind of quizzes him on their way up, and for a moment Odell is reminded of his former quarterback, who’d spring quizzes on the rest of his offense in the showers or between weight sessions in the training room. It simultaneously softens his heart and intensifies the ache that had faded out a little.

But they reach his room before long, and it really shouldn’t surprise Odell that his initial perception had been correct. Jimmy swaggers to a stop and leans up against the doorframe. “Off to the showers?” He asks, voice sultry and low, and _boy_. It really is something, the way this #10 is able to effortlessly pull off the switch from normal to sensual in no time at all.

“Yeah.” Odell rubs the back of his neck, suddenly a little nervous. Jimmy’s eyes flicker across his face and then linger on his lips, and he shivers unconsciously.

“Maybe you should, ah…” the quarterback’s eyes darken, “think twice about heading there so soon?” Odell shivers again as Jimmy gets even closer, so that they’re almost nose-to-nose. “Y’know, in case you get messy again.” Before Odell can answer, Jimmy closes the gap between them and kisses him firmly, lips warm and insistent against his own. _Oh_. He kisses back because it feels nice, because Jimmy is steady in the way he’s got O pressed against the door, because he misses being close to someone like this—

“ _Shit_.” Jimmy pulls away from the kiss, and Odell half-gasps at the loss of contact as if he’s been struck. “If you don’t want to do this, Odell, we don’t have to, I shouldn’t have assumed—”

“Jimmy.” Odell interrupts him, voice suddenly gravelly from the pent-up desire clogging his throat. “The door’s unlocked.” The quarterback cocks his head to the side, a little confused. To clear it up, Odell pulls him back into another kiss, biting and hungry, and understanding finally dawns on Jimmy. They crash through the hotel room door and it swings shut.

“I thought—” Jimmy gasps as they tear at each others’ practice uniforms, “—thought this was just, _fuck_ , thought this was going to be a drunk-us thing—”

“Shut _up_ Garoppolo,” Odell interrupts, kissing him again. Their teeth click as they kiss hungrily, desperately trying to get closer to each other even though it’s probably physically impossible. “Aren’t you—aren’t you going to fuck me?” Jimmy makes a low growling noise in his throat at O’s words and, as Odell asks, goes to town on him.

And here’s the thing about all of this—Odell’s still not in love with him by any stretch of the imagination. The hole in his heart shaped like a goofy 37 year old still hasn’t been filled or fully healed, and he doesn’t think it will be for a long time. But doing this…it feels nice, to be wanted like this, to get fucked by his new, young, immensely talented quarterback that wears the same number as his old one. Somewhere deep inside himself, Odell wonders if the 10 is related to all of this—a comfort number of sorts, a way for him to hold onto his feelings even if they won’t ever be reciprocated or acted upon. But he doesn’t pay the thought much mind, because this _is_ nice, as he’d said before; plus, Jimmy is handsome, and he’s pretty good at getting Odell off, so it’s a win-win.

They go at it for a while even after they both come, kissing and rutting shamelessly against each other in a cool hotel room overlooking the Minnesota sunset, talking but not really saying anything. It’s good, he thinks. It’s really, really good. (He could even get used to this.)

* * *

 

Jimmy stays over that night in his hotel room and they shower together in the morning. Odell can’t help but shudder as Jimmy jerks him off from behind under the hot water, face buried in the back of Odell’s shoulder, teeth cool and a little sharp as he pumps and pumps and _pumps_ —

And then, as soon as the quarterback leaves, things go back to normal as if they hadn’t just spent each other completely not even 12 hours before. Their team meeting goes without a hiccup, and the Saturday before their first real game is spent in game prep, hyperbaric chambers and minor lifting and superstitious routines being performed religiously as the clock ticks down to 12:00pm the next day.

They end up winning against the Vikings in a close call, and after the game Odell trades jerseys with Kirk and hugs Stefon. He gets congratulated a lot.

Eli texts him, too, which catches him completely off guard. He stares at his phone the entire flight home. _Great win today O. Saw the highlights. Looks like nothing’s changed_. He looks up Giants highlights from that day, too, and realizes that their game had happened at the same time as his own. (Which means Eli had gone out of his way to watch film of a team he wouldn’t have to think about for another eight weeks. For him.) He sees the final score—the Giants had won, though it had been an ugly game, apparently, and had even Tony Romo pulling out his hair in the announcer’s booth. His heart leaps knowing that they’d been able to start their season off right after everything that had happened before.

 _You too_ , Odell replies. Almost immediately, the little typing bubble appears at the bottom of his screen, and he watches it intently as it goes and goes and _goes_ for almost a minute and a half. Then it stops.

 _Thanks man_ is all Eli sends back, and Odell can’t help the disappointment that starts to solidify in his throat. He doesn’t even know _why_ he’d thought something would come out of this and chastises himself for even thinking about hope. To his left, Jimmy’s head on his shoulder shifts, and a little snore spills from his lips—something soft, something tender and intimate in a way he hadn’t expected it to be when he’d signed onto this team back in April. He swallows and sets his phone face-down on his thigh. He’s got film to watch soon, anyway—he can’t prepare for next Sunday if he’s stuck on a couple words from his past.

* * *

 

They win again the week after, against the Lions. Jimmy throws for 400 yards and spreads the ball pretty evenly among his receivers. Odell catches his first touchdown of the season and thinks he’s going to throw up he’s so excited—when the swarm of players comes to hug him in the endzone, quarterback included, he hollers in delight and bumps helmets with each of them. It’s exhilarating. He feels like he’s back home, running the ball up and down the field the way he was meant to without thinking twice about his ankle or his hamstring or even a tweaked finger. Even on the sidelines, between talks with coach Shanahan and coach LaFleur, he’s hyping up the home crowd and high-fiving his teammates. The postgame locker room celebration feels new in location but familiar in spirit, and as they all raise their helmets to cheer their victory, all Odell can think is how happy he is, and how much he wants to go back out next week and do the same thing again.

Of course, the next week they lose. Kansas City isn’t a team that they’d been expecting a challenge from, seeing as their previous starting quarterback had been shipped off to the NFC East (where he’d gotten them a two-game losing streak) and their current starter has only one NFL caliber game under his belt in his second year in the league. But he’d come prepared—this week, the rhythm just _cannot_ get started, and it’s unbelievably frustrating for everyone because of how good they’d been before. Something about Jimmy’s passes keep not landing, and they keep settling for field goals instead of taking it into the end zone the way they needed to. It’s hard to maintain success, Odell knows, but even then, only being able to pace the sidelines as the defense keeps getting worn out on the field makes him so mad he begins to get nauseous. The final score somehow manages to be within 7 points, but it’s still a loss, and is the first loss of Jimmy’s starting career.

“Hey, it happens to the best of us, yeah?” Odell asks, nudging the quarterback with his elbow in the post-game locker room haze. Jimmy just shakes his head and pulls away from Odell’s orbit.

“Guess the hype got to my head,” he answers quietly. O doesn’t think there’s really anything else that could be said—he knows exactly how it feels to have too big a head, knows exactly what it’s like to tumble from the high expectations that everyone else sets for you. He sets his hand gently on Jimmy’s bare shoulder and gives it a reassuring squeeze. If anything, he hopes it’s both reassuring and a reminder that next week won’t be the same.

“See you on the bus,” he says instead. Jimmy just nods.

But once they get back to their hotel that night, he hears a knock at his door and opens it to see Jimmy standing there, shoulders still sagging from defeat and expression unreadable.

“Jimmy?”

“Can I—” he doesn’t finish his sentence, just steps towards Odell, who can almost read his mind as Jimmy’s hand gently cups the back of his head. O nods wordlessly. When their lips touch, the kiss is full of anger and sadness and frustration, one that Odell tempers and feeds into at the same time. Who is he to deny his starting quarterback the comfort and support he needs right now? Their foreheads touch and Odell whispers something reassuring as they fall into his bed. The night is long and full of the ache of defeat, but dawn comes soon enough, and Jimmy’s hand on Odell’s hip tightens ever-so-slightly as morning light spills through the room. A reminder of the week to come, almost.

* * *

 

True to Odell’s unspoken belief, the San Francisco 49ers go on to win three games in a row, sporting an impressive 5-1 record by the time week seven rolls around. Jimmy has been on point in his game, the communication between the skills players is better than it had been the first few weeks, and the defense has been nothing short of excellent as they hold their opponents to an average of 12 points per game. It’s around this time that Odell really starts to immerse himself in the external community that the 9ers have supporting them. He volunteers at the local food bank with a couple of the newly drafted rookies and goes out all the time at night to experience the joy of not having to deal with the New York Post’s unbelievably nosy journalism.

In fact, he decides to go as far as to move to San Francisco instead of just living in Los Angeles and driving two and a half hours to Levi. The house he moves into is about the same size as his previous LA home, and it’s a little less expensive, too; not that he needs to worry about money, of course, but old habits die hard, and this one is no exception. He has a porch that overlooks the neighborhood he’s become part of, and most nights that he’s not out with his 9er friends, he’s on that deck absorbing as much game film as he can while going through both coach Shanahan’s notes _and_ Jimmy’s notes—though Jimmy’s are more succinct, and he’s been coming over to deliver them personally, lately. (Among other things.) Everything is going smoothly, and once again Odell finds himself genuinely enjoying his time in San Francisco. He’s a 49er now, and right in this moment, he doesn’t think there’s anywhere else he’d rather be.

The happiness and content feelings come to a halt in the 3rd quarter of week seven’s game. He’s running a route that he’s run a thousand times before and turned back to catch the ball when it happens—something in his ankle twists, and he whites out in pain. The route comes to a halt, he collapses to the field, and the play stops as what sounds like a thousand whistles blow at the same time. The pain in his ankle is throbbing, and shit, _shit_ , not _now_ , this can’t happen again—flashbacks of last year resurface painfully, the partial tear on the field, the cold metal of the cart seeping through his uniform as he cried on his way back to the locker room, the deafening silence that consumed him as he’d been wheeled back into the tunnel. All he can do is sit there now, hands on his helmet, choking back cries of pain as his teammates surround him. Distantly, he hears someone shouting for the team trainer.

And then, as if the universe just wants to hurt him a little bit more, he remembers when this had happened last year during preseason. Eli had crouched beside him, holding his helmet. “Hey, O, what happened?” His voice had been soft amid the clamor on the field, and when he reached over to rest a hand on Odell’s lower back, the touch had somehow radiated through the jersey and the pads and his undershirt. Even though he’d been in pain, there was comfort because Eli was next to him. With him. Here and now, curled up in his scarlet and gold uniform on the sharp grass beneath him, he can hear Eli beside him now.

“It’s okay, O,” Eli murmurs, sounding as clear in his mind as he had been that hot August day a year before. “’m right here, not going anywhere.” Tears spring into Odell’s eyes as he listens to Eli comfort him like he’s actually there. He _misses_ Eli’s presence on the field. It hadn’t been something he’d been thinking about lately, as the joy of playing again had been the only thing on his mind, but now as he’s sitting immobilized on the field without his anchoring presence at quarterback to hold him steady, the lack of Eli is suddenly the only thing he can think about.

He can make it off the field with minimal assistance, but he heads back to the locker room anyway for testing anyway, because the concern for his ankle takes precedence over his star presence on the field. Sitting in front of his locker, getting his ankle bandaged and iced and poked and prodded, all he can think of is Eli Manning crouched beside him. He forces the tears back with sheer willpower, but his heart is heavy all the same. The 9ers end up losing to the Rams, but Odell can’t find it in him to be heartbroken about it.

* * *

 

It’s not a break or a tear, thankfully. It’s a minor sprain at worst, the doctor tells him as he limps into the facility the next day. _You’ll just need some rehab_ is what he’s told, and he nods along, thankful it’s not more serious but upset all the same. Memories of last season haven’t stopped unveiling themselves, to the point where he’d gotten maybe three hours of sleep the previous night just from rehashing it all, and Odell feels like he’s being completely stopped in his tracks from the high-flying comeback season he’d been looking to have. _The comeback kid_. That’s what they’d called him before the season started, that’s what they’d been calling him week after week of winning, and yet the thing that he’s returning to is what made him famous last season—injury, not performance.

He gets texts from his friends around the league wishing him well, and Shep calls him to wish him well, and to tell him that Chanel had just gone into labor a couple hours ago. “Congrats, Young Shep!” Joy explodes in his chest hearing about his friends’ happiness. “Hey, congrats on y’all’s win the other day, man. ‘s a totally different look from last season. Shit, you even look like a WR1.”

Sterling laughs on the other end. “Yeah, man, yeah. Thanks. ‘s been weird without you, bruh, but I guess this is really the season where everything changes.”

“Yeah, here too.” There’s a lull in the conversation, only phone static between them. “How’s everyone doin’? Off the field, I mean. Locker room, night life, whatever.” He pauses again. “I miss it, a little.”

“We good, we good.” Out of nowhere, there’s a crackle on the other end, and the sound of footsteps.

“Shep?” Odell strains to listen for any clues, but the line is quiet. “Sterling? _Shep_?”

Footsteps run back towards the phone, and Odell once again hears the crackle as the phone crashes into Sterling’s face. He’s breathing a little heavily. “Sorry, O,” he says, “thought I heard a doctor calling for me or somethin’. Man, this baby’s got me all _anxious_ , you know? Like, shit. Never thought I’d get to marry the woman of my dreams, let alone be able to bring another little life…”

“Man…” Odell pauses, rubs a hand over his face. “Shep, I can’t think of another guy who deserves all this more than you. For real, man.” He can practically hear his friend getting flustered on the other end. “’sides, better to be anxious than lazy, right?”

Sterling laughs. “Yeah, you right. I just…damn.” Odell imagines that he’s shaking his head, rubbing his eyes because he hasn’t slept in probably at least a day. “Anyway, uh, we all good. Saquon’s so good, dude. You probably can see that, but…y’know, even off the field, he’s real great. You saw him that one weekend you came to visit, ‘nd you knew him before the draft, but man, he’s just…he’s great.” O smiles wanly. “And Eli’s good, but you probably coulda guessed that, ‘cause he never really changes. Still throwing bullets.”

Odell laughs, though it doesn’t feel funny to him. “Yeah, sounds about right.” He pretends his chest isn’t tight with longing.

He and Sterling talk for a little while longer—Shep asks about his ankle, Odell asks about the new offense, they laugh and talk about potentially meeting up after their first game as opponents in a couple weeks. It’s familiar and comforting, and he feels better after hanging up the phone, as if hearing from his former teammate had healed his recently acquired ankle sprain.

He half-limps into his kitchen and makes himself a mug of tea afterwards before hoisting himself onto his counter and scrolling through an email that Kyle had sent about some adjustments to offensive schemes. One of the dogs walks through and nuzzles his left foot, grumbling happily before lying down on the cool tiles underneath him. He grins. “Hey, baby,” he purrs, using his feet to rub her belly. “You bein’ a good girl?” She grumbles again, rolling over so he can get more of her belly. “Yeah, I thought so.”

* * *

 

Eli calls him the Friday before the next game. Odell is flipping through the updated playbook on his porch when his phone goes off, buzzing face-down on the ground next to him. He lowers his sunglasses and reaches down, lifting the phone to his ear and swiping _accept_ before he can read the caller ID.

“What’s up?” He’s expecting it to be Pierre or Marquise, maybe his mom or even Jimmy, though he thinks at least _one_ of them would have texted before ringing him like this.

“Hey, Oh-dell.” Eli’s voice catches him completely off guard, and Odell almost falls out of the patio chair as his quarterback’s voice floods his ears. “How’re you doin’?”

“Hey, E,” he answers, trying to keep the tremor out of his voice. “I’m good. You?”

Eli chuckles on the other end. “I’m good, O. ‘s been a while since we talked.” He pauses. “How’s your ankle? I saw the play it got tweaked on and got worried, since it’s the one from…”

“It’s fine, Eli.” He can’t help but smile at the concern in his quarterback’s voice. _Former_ quarterback. (He forgets to correct himself sometimes, though it’s been less frequent up until now.) “Thanks for worrying, though. ‘s just a sprain. I’ll be ready for when you fly out here in a couple weeks.”

“Hah.”

“So what’s up? You could’ve texted to see about my ankle…is everything okay?” Odell stands from his chair and walks back into his kitchen, where some papers are innocently scattered on the counter. He pushes them around for a few seconds, scanning them for information, and then swipes them off the table, watching as they flutter helplessly to the ground. “Eli?”

It sounds like Eli is startled at the question, because Odell can hear the way the phone moves against his face. “Yeah, yeah, O. Everything’s o—” He stops short. “You know, I…never mind. I should just go.”

“No, no!” He doesn’t mean to sound as forceful as he does, but in doing so, the goodbye starting to form on the other end of the line dissipates. “E, what is it?” Something cold surges in his stomach. Something ominous. “Eli, you can talk to me, man. What’s going on?”

“I didn’t want…I didn’t want to do this over the phone, O. I should’ve just waited ‘til I was out there in person for week ten…” He trails off, and Odell is about to demand more information when Eli continues. “You deserve to hear the truth, even if it means I have to say it like this.” He exhales. “I didn’t really know it until after I’d gotten back from our training session in May. And even then, it wasn’t that obvious. Not to me, anyway, ‘cause you know I can be a little…” he chuckles, and Odell can hear the self-depreciation really strengthening in his tone. “But I’m here now, and I just…I owe you that much.”

“What, Eli?”

“I love you.” Oh. _That_ wasn’t what Odell was expecting to hear. “I love you back, O, and I know it isn’t fair of me to just call you and tell you that like it’s nothin’ but it couldn’t wait. You had to know. I didn’t realize it until now, and it can’t ever….it can’t ever happen between us for _so_ many reasons, but I just wanted you to know…I love you too.”

Odell doesn’t think he can breathe. He has to steady himself on his kitchen counter, and his phone starts to slip out of his hand a little before he can secure it. “You love me?”

“I love you like the day is long,” Eli says breathlessly, southern drawl out in full force. “’nd it hit me as soon as I got off that plane because you weren’t _with_ me. It hasn’t been right in New York since you left, O, and as soon as I realized that, I realized the reason I _thought_ that was because…because I love you.”

“E…” A punch to the gut would’ve left him with more to say. “Eli…”

“But I can’t—we can’t. We can’t, O, no matter how much I want to. Hell, I doubt you still even feel the way you did all those months ago, ‘cause I’ve been nothin’ but distant and you’ve got your new life, but even if…even if you did, we couldn’t.”

“What’s stopping us, E? The media? We’ve been through shit before, hell, _I_ go through it all the god damn time. I’d take it a hundred times stronger if it meant I could be with you. I’d plaster myself on the Daily News every day for _forever_ if I…if we…”

“I’ve got kids, Odell. And a franchise still on my shoulders, and you’re so _young_ I could never even dream…it would only hurt you, and I can’t—I can’t do that. Not again. Not after what I put you through last season.”

“But you didn’t _do_ that to me, Eli!” Odell can’t help the fact that his voice is starting to rise. He’s grateful he didn’t take one of the receivers up on their offer to be roommates. “It was a _play_ , we’d run it a thousand times before, you didn’t do anything but execute it the way we always did! You’ve _never_ hurt me!”

“But I did. You know I did, O, when you first said it. That you loved me. I didn’t say _anything_ , just disappeared and pretended like it didn’t happen, and it _hurt_ you. I saw the way you looked sitting with me waiting for my plane out. You shouldn’t—you can’t ignore that, especially not from me.”

Odell snorts disbelievingly. “If it means we get to be together, E, I’d ignore—”

“But we _don’t_ get to be together, Odell.” His voice, which had been tender and confessional only seconds before, has now turned to steel. “Our lives are so different—they’re _so_ different, they really are, and it’d never work. Roger Goodell would have a field day and a _half_. He’s already banned inter-facility relationships and staff-player relationships: imagine what he would do if he found out that two _players_ were together?” Odell imagines that Eli’s got his face in his hands right now as he’s talking. There’s something heartbreakingly frustrated about his demeanor, and Odell feels sick with it, knowing that that’s exactly how this is happening. He knows Eli Manning like the back of his hand, and the one thing he _didn’t_ know was something that he couldn’t…he couldn’t even…

“Why would you tell me this, Eli.” It’s meant to be a question but suddenly the life in his own voice seems to have drained completely. “If we can’t—if you don’t want to be together, why are you telling me this now.”

There’s a long pause on the other end. Odell thinks he’s hung up, which allows the sob in his chest to form more properly, but then the line crackles and Eli’s voice spills through again. It’s quiet once more; the steel and power that he’d heard seconds before has completely disappeared. “Because…” Eli coughs, and when he speaks again, his voice is gravelly. “I didn’t…I didn’t want you to think I don’t feel the same. I couldn’t imagine—you not knowing that I love you, _Oh-dell_ , god, that thought makes me sick. I could never not love you.” O can’t find the words to respond. He sinks down onto the closest chair and exhales shakily. He doesn’t say a word. “I’m sorry, O. I am. Good luck on Sunday.” The line _click_ s dead, and the noise rattling around in his throat surfaces.

He screams, throws his phone across the house, and then sinks into his chair more fully. The tears come later that night, and Odell remembers _you’re the best receiver I ever had_ in time to regurgitate it into his toilet. _I love you like the day is long_. Ten years and this is where it ends. Where it _really_ ends.

* * *

 

Odell is up before dawn. It’s not like he’d been able to sleep, anyway—Eli’s words are like a curse, the way they’ve completely captured his thoughts and stolen the calm in his heart. _I love you back_. Word-for-word, he had set every nerve ending in Odell’s body on fire by echoing his seemingly-unrequited feelings and then smothered them as quickly as they’d gone up. All that’s left is smoke, and there’s so much of it that Odell thinks he may just never breathe right again. The morning after the bomb had been dropped, the first thing Odell does is hop in his car and drive out to Levi. (He’s been working on installing some semblance of a gym in his new house, but it’s slow going—he’s also been regularly driving to Levi anyway to work out with the rest of the receiving corps, so this journey isn’t anything out of the ordinary.) Top down, music blaring, he speeds through the quiet streets of his neighborhood completely numb.

Except, about fifteen minutes into his drive, he realizes that he’s not actually headed towards the stadium, or even to his favorite non-team-affiliated gym. Instinct had driven him straight into Jimmy Garoppolo’s driveway, and against his better judgement, he follows through with it. He climbs the steps two at a time and knocks three times on the front door.

There’s no answer.

 _I love you back_ echoes in his head and he feels sick, he feels so _sick_ and the one person he thinks he needs right now isn’t even answering his front door—

“O?” The door swings open and there’s his quarterback, hair mussed and eyes a little squinty from sleep. Odell realizes, belatedly, that it’s _just_ sunrise now, and that he’d probably woken Jimmy up from his well-needed pre-prime time sleep.

“Jimmy, I’m—I’m sorry, I shouldn’t’ve—”

“ _Oh-dell_.” The remnants of sleep in his voice bend his name in the way he’s been trying to remove from his heart, and for some reason, that’s what pushes him over the edge. Hot tears start to form in his eyes.

“Can I—?”

“Hey, yeah. Yeah. Come—come here.” Jimmy pulls him into a gentle embrace, one that Odell falls right into and melts in. He wants to let go, wants to just _break_ the way he needs to, but he can’t even do _that_ here because Jimmy can’t know him like this. Not this deeply.

“Thank you,” Odell whispers. They’re standing in his front hall, still hugging. Jimmy presses his lips to the swath of skin peeking out from the shirt Odell had slept in, a gesture of tenderness, and then, as they pull apart, he kisses O full on the lips, gentle but steady. Odell kisses him back. Gently, at first, but then he thinks about the words fogging his mind and the kisses get harder. Hungrier. He can hear the noises in Jimmy’s throat and he wants them in his ears—wants to hear them so he can drown out the excuses Eli had made, wants the cascade of untouchable dreams battering his mind to just end.

When they part for air, the quarterback makes a noise that sounds like _upstairs?_ and Odell just nods.

For the first time, Odell spends the entire day with Jimmy alone. They train, they flirt, they even fuck again later in the day on the floor of the quarterback’s in-home weight room; the ache settled in Odell’s ribcage dissipates ever-so-slightly, and with the game against the Cards looming, O finds that he has something else to focus on.

* * *

 

They win. Odell and the 49ers plow over the Arizona Cardinals 35-7, and the locker room is ecstatic as they charge in full of adrenaline and victorious energy. Playoff implications are starting to surface again from the team’s too-hopeful beat writers, and it’s electric, this confidence he’s surrounded by.

Jimmy sweeps him into a kiss in the showers. “We did it, baby,” he murmurs beneath the hot water, and Odell nods, kisses him back, but doesn’t say anything.

* * *

 

The 9ers win against the Raiders on a short week, to the team’s exhausted joy. Though it’s a close game and Odell has to be taken out a few times due to the fear of his ankle re-straining itself, it’s _fun_ and it keeps him on his toes the entire time. He’d never admit it out loud (since he’d adopted the _hate the Raiders_ mentality that his teammates and practically everyone else he knows has) but Oakland— _Vegas_ —performed well against them: well enough that several teammates of his had quietly said some semblance of prayer on the bench before the clock finally expired.

But it ends, and it brings the team another game closer to the playoff spot. It has Odell feeling so good that when he’s reminded of their opponent on Monday night, his former team, his only response is a long pause, and then, with a Black Panther-esque flourish—“Niners forever, dawg.” It’s easy to feel in control with the wins piling up underneath their name, especially compared to his previous season; nothing could knock him down from the win streak they’re starting to build. They’re 7-2, after all, and Odell is confident that, as much as he loves his friends on his former team, they don’t match up all that well against the current 9ers he’s celebrating with.

* * *

 

Locking eyes with Eli on Monday night, though, on opposite sides of the field, _that_ chills him to his core. Not out of fear, not because he’s ashamed or angry or numb after everything that’s gone on between them. No, he’s chilled because Eli looks—exactly the same. Still goofy, still a little crinkly around the eyes, and when he realizes who he’s looking at, his whole face softens. Everything in Odell freezes up because _how_ did he ever think this was going to be something he could handle? Even with ten-plus weeks of cushion, even with hours and hours of film and team bonding and fan encounters, even with the entire city of San Francisco bending over backwards to make him feel even more welcome here than before…Eli’s smile widens on the New York bench, and he waves as if nothing has changed between them. Chills crawl up Odell’s spine. He forces himself to smile and wave back because it’s _Eli_ , he has to, but somewhere in the back of his mind he can only think of Jimmy’s lips on his neck, his voice low and husky in his ear, _so good for me so good for me feel so good_ grunted between too-hot, too-angry kisses, and it feels wrong, to be looking across the field at the man he loves more than anything and acting like the world between them hadn’t ended with one phone call.

The 49ers score on their first possession of the game, Raheem punching it in after a great series of throws from Jimmy to Pierre, Marquis, and Odell. The Giants defense looks good but there are clear holes, and Odell tries his hardest not to chat with Snacks and OV as he runs through them with ease. Odell jogs back onto the sidelines and high-fives a few guys, grinning from ear to ear despite himself because this game is what keeps him going, it really is. He’s all smiles until he watches Eli march out onto the field.

Admittedly, he’s been watching every Giants game that he can this season, to see what he’s been missing—as if he hadn’t just signed a four-year contract to remain in San Fran, as if he’s just on a season-long vacation and he’s going to come home and have to learn everything all over again. But it doesn’t compare to seeing it live for the first time in months. Even from a distance, Odell sees the way his quarterback can command his team, can move Shep and Lewis out and turn Saquon into the machine everybody knows he is. (Eli is always going to be his quarterback. That’s never going to change.) They charge down the field and suddenly, Odell is breathless on the sidelines with the thought that this is going to be a fight. The Giants are going to show life in a way they hadn’t in over a year.

The first half speeds by as both teams go at it, hitting hard and running fast, until the score reads 21-17 at halftime with the Giants down by four. And then, of course, time slows to almost a stop. Deep in the caverns of Levi’s Stadium, completely unintentionally, Odell runs face-first into Eli’s chest. How, he isn’t sure, but it doesn’t even matter—it doesn’t matter, because when Eli looks down with his soft, goofy smile and says “ _’ve missed you, O_ ” tenderly, something in him snaps. He pulls Eli into a sudden, earth-shattering kiss out of nowhere and, despite the initial pang of anxiety that blossomed in his chest, doesn’t find himself regretting it. Especially not when the look in Eli’s eyes is dark and intrigued as they pull apart.

“We got ten minutes,” he says simply, and Odell forgets how to breathe when Eli presses his palm to Odell’s lower back. He’s decked out in ugly 49ers maroon but is quickly stripped bare by veteran hands in a too-warm closet far enough between both locker rooms, the sound of pads jostling and clashing hard against each other the only other noise in the room besides the two of them. They kiss and kiss and kiss, half a sob lodged in O’s throat the entire time, but Eli is so warm and gentle, and he murmurs _hey, hey, I got you_ , a mantra that Odell falls right into like they’d been doing this the whole time they were together in New York, and it’s okay. It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay. They fuck for maybe five minutes before Eli comes first, Odell tumbling afterwards, and they clean each other up with lingering hands and quiet voices before jogging back into their respective rooms.

Eli leads the Giants to a stellar victory in the second half of the game, and Odell can’t find himself complaining. His quarterback’s gentle kisses and hesitant but heavy touches replace Jimmy’s hungry hands on his body, and for the first time in fourteen weeks, Odell is happy as he looks at the uniform hanging in his locker. He thinks he can even see a smear of Eli’s come in the seam of his right shoulder.

* * *

 

Early December snow swirls around their Denver hotel room as Odell collapses next to Jimmy on the bed, sweating and breathing heavily after a particularly rousing session. Their game against the Broncos has been postponed a few hours because of inclement weather, and it had offered the two of them an extra few hours before mandatory pre-game practice together. He’s smiling, full of affectionate feelings, but when Jimmy turns to look at him with soft, tired eyes, Odell doesn’t get the same strangling feeling he’d had standing chest-to-chest with Eli Manning in the secret corridors of Levis Stadium. The thought sends a rush through him, and then a pang of guilt.

After all of this—after _everything_ —Odell knows he owes Jimmy Garoppolo, face of the San Francisco 49ers and sweetest fuck-buddy around, the truth.

“I’m in love with Eli.” The words feel wrong as they roll into Jimmy’s bare shoulder, the two of them tucked deep under the covers in the quarterback’s low-lit room. He can’t lie about it anymore, not to a man who’s been better to him than he thinks he deserves. “Shoulda said something before we started, but it happened so fast and I wanted us to connect the way I used to be connected to him before.” Jimmy’s hand is warm on Odell’s lower back.

“I know,” he responds after a moment. His voice is quiet and a little raspy, but Odell can’t place the emotion in it. They’ve been on-and-off fucking for a few months now, and he prides himself on being a good judge of emotion when it comes to people he’s this close with, so he looks up into Jimmy’s face as soon as the words leave his lips. “’s not like you’re subtle, ‘dell.” His smile is toned down and a little sad.

“And you’re not…?” _Mad? Jealous? Surprised?_ O’s not sure what he would do if any of those reactions had actually come into play.

“Nah.” Jimmy shifts so that Odell has to roll off of him, but the receiver props himself up on the pillow and looks intently at his quarterback. “I know what that feels like.”

“You do?”

“I do,” he repeats. “You’re not the only one that got traded across the country, man.” _Oh_. Odell realizes at the same time that he’s not the only man to fall in love with his veteran quarterback and then get tossed to San Francisco. Tom Brady, king of the sport, one of the greatest to ever do it—it’s no surprise, really, but it stills Odell anyway. He presses his lips to Jimmy’s shoulder.

“Did he know?” As he asks, he remembers Eli inside of him, moving so effortlessly and murmuring _baby, baby, baby_ over and over like he’d meant it. He’d known Odell was in love with him since May and he’d kissed the words off his mouth in that dimly lit closet in November, and it still isn’t enough for Odell—he can’t imagine Jimmy answering anything other than _yes_.

“I don’t know.”

* * *

 

The rest of December flies by. The injury bug strikes San Francisco at the worst possible time, pairing horribly with their 7-3 record before the bye week. They travel to Tampa Bay and win against the Buccaneers, but the next week they’re in Seahawks territory and lose to their division rivals—badly. Marquise goes down with a foot sprain, and Pierre’s hands magically turn to stone as he drops pass after pass that Jimmy throws him. The rhythm they’d established in the first half of their season practically collapses entirely in one game—even his chemistry with Jimmy, which had been developing quickly through their extracurricular activities, takes a massive leap backwards. Though he only drops one pass during the game, something is wrong with their communication, and not one, not two, but _three_ routes are run incorrectly. Both men had been able to make a play out of it, but it’s a striking contrast from the way that things had been going earlier in the season. Their midnight meetings have been dwindling since both of them had voiced their feelings for other people, and while it’s been mutual, there’s something in Odell’s gut that makes him think that, by still sleeping with his quarterback, he’d be helping the team get closer to a playoff run.

The _worst_ part about all of it, though, worse than the awkwardness and the injuries and the division fallout, is that Odell can barely keep himself focused on it all. It’s terrible and he hates himself for it, but he’s been thinking about Eli ever since their night together in his stadium. A week after it had happened, his former quarterback had sent him a simple text: _I’m sorry_. Calling him back after was an impulse, more than anything, but they’d spent the rest of that night talking quietly on the phone, time zones be damned, and when Odell had woken up the next morning curled up next to his phone, warmth blossomed in his chest, and suddenly the two thousand, nine hundred and seven miles between them didn’t matter quite as much.

His mind has been in the clouds since that night, and it’s bad because their final stretch of games should be at the top of his priorities and it just _isn’t_. How could it be? It isn’t fair and he knows it, so he tries to be at least open to the criticism and training that coach Shanahan and the rest of the San Francisco staff are placing on his shoulders (and the rest of the team’s, too) instead of taking it personally. He can’t really blame them anyway: his heart has left the building.

To top it all off, Odell finds that he misses Eli even _more_ in this last stretch of games. Before, it had been a constant ache that had faded somewhere around October and remained dormant until the Rams game. Now, though, after their last meeting, it’s returned to the forefront of his mind. After their first loss in Seattle, Eli had called him and apologized for the outcome. (As if he had anything to apologize for—Odell had teased him about it, causing a jumble of words to spill from Eli’s mouth all at once from being flustered, and it had taken his own breath away.) Then, a few days before O’s next game against the Rams, Eli had called again to wish him luck, and Odell had said _I love you_ as he hung up only to hear Eli say it back to him real soft, and oh, _that’s_ what that feels like. They’d lost the game in a blowout, but Odell realized later it didn’t even matter because the echo in his heart had been keeping his head up. _I love you too_. The words had lost their painful edge long ago. He’d gotten another text, too, another _I’m sorry_ but this time with a clumsily-placed heart emoji in the middle of the words, and Odell’s heart had practically exploded seeing this unintentionally dorky-yet-affectionate side of Eli.

Of course, Odell’s softened heart isn’t the only thing missing his quarterback. Even though he’d never actually been in love with Jimmy Garoppolo or felt any deep emotional attachment towards him beyond what could be classified as a romanticized dynamic of necessity, the time they’d spent being physically together had been a good release for him. The removal of the almost-starting-to-become-regular… _thing_ between them has been making more of an impact than he had thought it would. However, as only the hero of New York could, Eli Manning swoops in and saves the day.

“Hey,” he says over the phone one night. Odell looks up even though they’re not in the same room. Hell, they’re not even on the same _coast_. “You sound stressed.”

“Ah, can’t help it, E. ‘s been a rough end to the season, that’s all.” O swipes a hand over his face. “’sides, you ain’t gotta worry about me, you know that.”

There’s a pause on the other end of the line. “I was just…thinking. About ways to help.” Eli’s voice drops almost an entire octave, somehow, and the shiver that crawls up Odell’s is definitely not from the gust of cool December wind that manages to slip through the cracks in his windowsill. His mouth suddenly feels dry.

“Yeah?” Struck dumb by the abrupt (but not unwelcome) shift in conversation, Odell practically collapses onto his bed. His shorts start to feel a little tighter.

“Yeah, baby. You know. Help you…talk it out.” He must be pulling out all the stops because this is the smoothest that Odell’s ever heard him, though he isn’t complaining in the slightest. “’cause, y’know, I’ve been thinkin’ about you…”

“Mmmm? Like what.” Hand in his pants, he’s hard so fast that he’s dizzy, and Eli must know that even over the phone with nothing but a voice to guide him, because he hums low in the back of his throat and Odell can’t help the little gasp that spills into the phone’s speaker.

“Oh, honey, you know…” _God_ does Odell want to. He’s pumping himself slow and pretending it’s Eli’s hand, that Eli’s calloused palms are rubbing him up and down the way he likes it, the way he _needs_ it. “Kissin’ you real slow. Having you all pressed up against the doors of the locker room, breathin’ heavy like you’re runnin’ routes or somethin’…” His southern drawl comes out fully, dropping full syllables off words as Odell breathlessly jerks off listening to him talk about all the ways he’s going to touch, going to _fuck_ him after a season apart. Odell can also hear the way his voice is getting more and more ragged at every sentence and it’s driving him insane, how easily Eli has him riled up just by getting riled up himself. “You—you like that, baby?”

“ _Please_ ,” O manages, choked and raw in his throat as he gets closer and closer to falling off the edge. “God, E, tell me more I’m close I’m close I’m _close_ —”

“’m gonna make you mine, sweetheart.” The words are more of a growl than actual words, and jesus _christ_ that is all it takes. Odell pulls back on the head of his cock and comes all over his own hand, _Eli Eli Eli fuck oh god fuck Eli_ pouring from his lips. He completely whites out.

After a few moments of breathlessness, as well as Odell listening in for the guttural moan on the other end of the phone, Eli takes a deep breath and resumes talking at his normal pitch. “You feelin’ better?”

Odell can’t help the giggle that builds in his throat. “ _Much_ better, E. Thanks for lookin’ out for me.”

* * *

 

The week after the Rams game, the San Francisco 49ers pull together a massive team effort to beat the Seattle Seahawks and come up short. It’s not particularly surprising, though Odell feels bad for Sherm and how painful it must be, to see your former team winning _against_ you without you. (He tells him in the locker room, later, that it had been hard for him against the Giants, too, but it’s not entirely true—something had happened between halves that had softened the blow of defeat.) Though their record is at 9-6 right now, with a wildcard berth still plausible if a week 17 miracle occurs, there’s a feeling among them that has been festering for weeks, now. Nothing _bad_ , per-say. Just…empty.

Odell sits down in the facility with Jimmy and goes over tape from the past few weeks, both their own and the new stuff coming from Chicago, and he feels bad that this quarterback who had put the entire city on his back was crashing and burning because of some poorly timed incidents.

The Friday before their final game, Jimmy had volunteered to lock the building up after hours so that they’d have extra time to try and craft their plan for the Bears. The two of them had spent a good part of their night together running through routes, and knowing that it probably won’t help them in the end only breaks Odell’s heart further. His west-coast ten doesn’t deserve this type of ending to his inaugural season, no matter how things between them ended. As they leave the stadium bumping shoulders, Odell clears his throat.

“’m sorry, G,” he says quietly as they head out towards their cars. The street lamps scattered around the lot glitter against the darkened sky, and Odell can see that his words hit Jimmy in multiple ways. “You know. For—”

“’s okay, ‘dell. You don’t…you don’t have to be sorry. We got too cocky, y’know? That’s on me.”

“That’s on _us_ ,” Odell corrects, and Jimmy laughs humorlessly. “You can’t carry a whole team just on your own. We gotta pull our weight, too.” Funnily enough, it sounds like the reverse of a speech Eli had given him back in 2015. “Don’t take all the blame.”

Jimmy laughs that same laugh again. “I guess,” is all he says, and then offers a half-whispered goodbye before climbing into his car and driving off. O doesn’t need to have been sleeping with him to know that he hadn’t believed what he’d been told. _It’s all part of the game_ , he tells himself, but it doesn’t stop him from feeling guilty. Later, Jimmy texts him a thank you note and Odell just responds _I got you, man_.

He owes his quarterback that much, at least.

* * *

 

The Bears prove to be a more difficult opponent than anyone on the 9ers had expected. Playoff bound with a Wild Card spot practically tucked away in their belt, Odell can only watch in disbelief as Mitch Trubisky carves up the 49ers defense play after play. The matchup itself had been hyped for weeks on end; two young quarterbacks that had been through _hell_ in their first two seasons and two squads that had been counted out the year before, it seemed like the Bears/9ers game would be one of revenge and equally hard-hitting performance.

Instead, it’s a long, tired game that eventually completely drains the San Francisco bench. The Bears, to their credit, had been hot coming in, since their season hadn’t been derailed by a combination of sub-par coaching and key injuries, and even in the film that Odell had watched with his teammates, nothing had prepared them for the game that they’d played. San Fran loses by 10 points. Their season ends at 9-7.

It ends, and while the pangs of loss are there, it feels wrong that he’s not shattered by the dive that his supposed dream team had suffered through. So once his locker is cleared out the Monday after their playoff hopes have been stuffed, Odell pays a visit to Jed and John.

Their conversation is a fairly short one.

“I don’t feel like I belong here.” The point is blunt, and Jed raises an eyebrow, but Odell shakes his head and then continues. “I mean, that came out wrong, but what I’m saying is that, you know, I feel like there are bigger concerns than wide receiver on this team, and I don’t know if they’ll get fixed even if we make the playoffs next season.”

John hums neutrally. Jed’s eyebrow returns to its normal position. “I think that’s more of a decision for Kyle and John here to make, wouldn’t you say?” He absentmindedly taps the end of his pen against his forehead a few times. “Odell, we’ve loved you here, and we have no reason to even _consider_ letting you leave. What’s got you saying this?”

Odell shrugs. “I just want the best for this team, even if it means I’m not on it.”

Jed opens his mouth to say something, but John rests a hand on his shoulder gently to stop him. He turns to the receiver. “Let’s say that what you’re talking about is the way we’ll go about things, hypothetically. How do _you_ think your absence will benefit the team?”

“Money,” Odell says immediately, and the spark of interest that had lit up in John Lynch now has Jed York’s attention. “I restructure my contract so that the cap hit for y’all is low, and then another team can eat my contract if-slash-when I’m released so that you’ve got more room to work with.”

Jed scoffs. “What team would be willing to do _that_?”

Odell bites back a smile. “I can think of one.”

* * *

 

 

> **ESPN: _BLOCKBUSTER DEAL—VOID? ODELL BECKHAM JR TRADED BACK TO THE NEW YORK GIANTS._**
> 
> Of all the transactions to take place this offseason, Odell Beckham Jr hadn’t been a name that many had expected to resurface. And yet, that’s just what the 26-year-old wide receiver did this Sunday afternoon. Reports say that CEO Jed York has been in communication with the team and determined that their previous season’s signing of Giants’ star had, while momentarily productive, ultimately stalled progressive movement, as it ignored offensive line needs. (The acquisition of other Giant, C Weston Richburg, while a step in the right direction, doesn’t do nearly enough to carry the rest of this line.) Sources say that John Mara and Dave Gettleman were the first on the phone to re-claim their former all-star, even at the cost of his massive contract being eaten by the team.
> 
> Allegedly, Eli Manning has offered to restructure his contract in order to make this happen, but no sources in Manning’s camp have confirmed any information as of yet.

* * *

 

The flight back to New York has him in knots, though he’s not even sure why. He’s headed back to the city he’d started in—back to the Giants, back to his friends, back to Eli, and the excitement is practically choking him as he stares out at the passing clouds. He’s not even sure what he’s going to do when he sees Eli again, let alone walk back into MetLife again like he’d been dreaming of since he’d gotten the call almost a year ago. He’s expecting—well, he’s not sure what he’s expecting. Maybe it’ll be rainy when his plane touches down. Maybe his agent will be waiting for him with news about ESPN promising to stay off his ass. (Well, it’s a stretch, but he can hope, can’t he?)

What he isn’t expecting, of course, is what he gets, which in retrospect really shouldn’t have been surprising at all. He steps through the gate and locks eyes with none other than Elisha Nelson Manning, a full-blown smile on his face complete with pink cheeks. His eyes are shining. Odell’s knees almost instantly threaten to give out, and he has to take a deep, steadying breath to keep from completely falling apart. Eli opens his arms and mouths _hey_ like he’d done after they’d had sex in that tiny little closet in San Francisco, and _god_ , Odell really does think he’s going to faint.

“Hey.” He can barely keep the tremor out of his voice as he strides right up into Eli’s embrace. Face buried in his quarterback’s shoulder, he shakily exhales another _hi_ but only because he thinks it’s the only thing he knows how to say.

“Hey, O,” Eli murmurs into his hair. “Welcome home.”

Odell pulls back from him for a moment, forcing tears back with sheer willpower and a quick swipe of the arm as he looks up into E’s face. He takes another deep breath. “Glad to be back.”


End file.
